Plenty (Author Biography)

Author Biography

David Hare was born to Clifford Theodore and Agnes Gilmour Hare on June 5, 1947. He was born in St. Leonard’s which is located in Sussex, England. His father was a sailor and when he was five, his family moved to the small coastal town of Bexhill-on-Sea. Hare began his career as a playwright, director, and filmmaker while attending Jesus College in Cambridge where he earned his M.A. in English with honors in 1968. Prior to attending university, Hare was educated at Lancing College in West Sussex on a scholarship. In 1968 he founded and subsequently directed a traveling company called the Portable Theatre with which he was associated until 1971. Throughout his career, Hare has served as a resident dramatist, literary manager, and director of other reputable theatre companies, including the Royal Court Theatre in London.

In 1970 he married Margaret Mathieson, who at that time was his theatrical agent. Hare and Mathieson had three children, Joe, Lewis, and Darcy. After ten years of marriage, the couple divorced. Hare married for the second time, in 1992, to Nicole Farhi.

By 1998, Hare had close to thirty published plays, essays, and films as well as several unpublished works to his credit. His writing is noted for its political orientation and its focus on British themes. According to Mel Gussow in a New York Times Magazine article, Hare often treats such concerns “as the collapse of the English empire, the debilitating effects of the class system, the myths of patriotism, [and] the loss of personal freedom.” Hare is also known for creating politically and morally ambiguous plays, despite his rather clear-cut leftist politics. His first published play, How Brophy Made Good was first produced in Brighton, England, at Brighton Combination Theatre in 1969 and was subsequently published in Gambit in 1970.

Hare did not begin to receive public attention until he produced Slag in April of 1970; however, since then he has been honored for his works on numerous occasions. In 1975 he became the first dramatist to win the presitigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and in 1983 Plenty received the New York Critics Circle Award for best foreign play. Hare is perhaps best known for Plenty, which achieved a high profile when it was made into a film starring Meryl Streep. Despite the fact that Hare’s work has received severe criticism at times, he has still developed a fine literary reputation. As Joan Fitzpatrick Dean noted in her book David Hare, “Hare has earned an impressive reputation not only as a prolific writer but also as a theater and film director, theater founder, and literary manager.” Hare’s work is considered to have made an important contribution to his nation’s body of contemporary literature.