Gauguin's epithet serves as the motto for this moral tale of two women, both in their sixties, whose lives are interwoven in ways neither of them yet understand. Madeleine Palmer is a retired curator, living alone on the Isle of Wight. One day to her door comes Angela Beale, a woman she has met only once, who is now enjoying sudden success, late in life, as a popular novelist. The progress of a single night comes fascinatingly to echo the hidden course...

Kyra is a young teacher working and living in one of London's less attractive districts. Tom's wife has recently died of cancer: he is a wealthy entrepreneur and Kyra's former lover. On a cold winter night Tom's teenage son, Edward, calls on Kyra to beg her to reconcile with his father. The reconciliation turns into a searing conflict of contemporary British values as well as of emotions.

Selections from interviews conducted by David Hare in preparation for a trilogy of plays concerning the crises facing the Church, the Law, and the Labour Party of contemporary Britain.

This play continues the run of work in which Hare has sought to describe the atmosphere of contemporary Britain. Victor Quinn, employs a young poet to decorate the legend of his fast-growing Internet business. Nothing prepares either man for the outcome.

"After a long period of turmoil, the Leader's office has imposed an uneasy period of calm on the Labour Party. But the leader, George Jones, knows he has only one chance of power." "The third part of a trilogy of plays about British institutions, The Absence of War offers an original look at the way modern politicians think and act, as well as a meditation on the classic problems of leadership." "Alongside the first two parts of the trilogy, Racing...

Drama counterpointing experiences of English-woman helping the French Resistance during World War II with her life in the following twenty years. Music, 12 scenes, 9 men, 5 women, 4 interiors, 2 exteriors.

In 1997, David Hare, a fifty-year-old British playwright, visited the state of Israel while his play, Amy's View, was in rehearsal in Tel Aviv. During his visit, he traveled around the country, and his discussions with Jewish settlers encompassed the idealism, contradictions, and paranoia at the heart of modern Zionism in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. In the play that resulted (written to be performed by the author himself) Hare...

"In 1997, David Hare adapted the little-known play, Ivanov, and revealed the young Anton Chekhov as a markedly different writer from the one English-speaking audiences recognize from the more familiar plays. Now Hare has turned his attention to the other, equally surprising key work of Chekhov's youth - an abandoned seven-hour teenage manuscript in which a Russian schoolmaster faces up to the implications of being irresistibly attractive to four different...

"What have we learned (and what might we have forgotten) from history's bloody backwash? Guilt, love, and history are three skeins, woven together to create human beings or, alternately, human monsters. The question of wartime culpability undergirds the May-December romance in postwar Berlin between Hanna, a weary-looking, sexually rapacious streetcar ticket-taker and Michael, a young schoolboy whom she seduces, ravenously and to his great delight....