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The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir Hardcover – November 2, 2015

by David Hare (Author)

83 ratings

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“Frank, moving, and beguiling, The Blue Touch Paper is the fascinating story of becoming a writer in the 1960s and 70s when Britain was changing even faster than the author.”―Joan Didion

David Hare has long been one of Britain’s best-known screenwriters and dramatists. He’s the author of more than thirty acclaimed plays that have appeared on Broadway, in the West End, and at the National Theatre. He wrote the screenplays for the hugely successful films The Hours, Plenty, and The Reader. Most recently, his play Skylight won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival on Broadway.

Now, in his debut work of autobiography, “Britain’s leading contemporary playwright” (Sunday Times) offers a vibrant and affecting account of becoming a writer amid the enormous flux of postwar England. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humor, he takes us from his university days at Cambridge to the swinging 1960s, when he cofounded the influential Portable Theatre in London and took a memorable road trip across America, to his breakthrough successes as a playwright amid the political ferment of the ’70s and the moment when Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of the decade.

Through it all, Hare sets the progress of his own life against the dramatic changes in postwar England, in which faith in hierarchy, religion, empire, and the public good all withered away. Filled with indelible glimpses of such figures as Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Helen Mirren, and Joseph Papp, The Blue Touch Paper is a powerful evocation of a society in transition and a writer in the making.

8 pages of illustrations

Editorial Reviews

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"A master class in how private reckonings sometimes find their greatest resonance on the stage."
― Megan O'Grady, Vogue

"A highly articulate and probing self-examination that is at the same time a vivid cultural study of postwar Britain."
― Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

"An intelligent, unsentimental glimpse inside the creative process. . . . [A] sometimes abrasive, always engaging account of [Hare’s] changing dramatic ideals."
― Wendy Smith, Washington Post

"[Hare] has a lightness of touch and a casual eloquence that might surprise those familiar with [his] knotty, politically engaged dramas. . . . He also tosses in enough juicy backstage stories."
― Charles Isherwood, New York Times

"What’s extraordinary about The Blue Touch Paper is how much intellection and drama and sensibility and wit Mr. Hare squeezes into [it]. This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life. Mr. Hare is a man who seizes on details and ideas, and who writes as if words matter."
― Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Wonderfully entertaining…. You have to admire Hare’s appetite to engage with his times with such savage gusto…. The Blue Touch Paper is an engrossing dive into the passions, the disappointments, the quarrels and the elation of a great professional trying to get something done."
― Tina Brown, New York Times Book Review

"The Blue Touch Paper encompasses exquisitely rendered love stories, rousing arguments about the relationship between art and politics, great gossip, and far, far more. A book that contained only one of those pleasures would be good news; a book that contains all of them is a legitimate treasure."
― Michael Cunningham

"Frank, moving, and beguiling, The Blue Touch Paper is the fascinating story of becoming a writer in the 1960s and ’70s when Britain was changing even faster than the author."
― Joan Didion

About the Author

David Hare has written more than thirty plays, including Skylight, Amy’s View, The Blue Room, and Stuff Happens. His screenplays, including The Hours, Plenty, and The Reader, have twice been nominated for an Academy Award and three times for the Golden Globes. He lives in London.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First U.S. Edition (November 2, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393249182
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393249187
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,890,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,201 in British & Irish Dramas & Plays
- #11,972 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
- #55,428 in Memoirs (Books)

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Michael Ramsay MD
The making of one of the world's great dramatists.
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2015
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This is a wonderful book. superbly written, well, the author has had numerous Broadway successes, and he has had multiple Oscar nominations for his screenplays. The author's prose sings. The journey to being one of the greatest playwrights of our time is told with elegance and wit with seamless anecdotes weaving effortlessly throughout the narrative incorporating the major cultural icons of the past fifty years. Sir David Hare's early years in Britain unfold like a favorite black and white movie and without the author being tendentious or pedagogical we learn the pathway to becoming a world class playwright, bar none. A must read for all who love life, literature, and the theatre. His recent achievements are not covered to any significant extent. Hopefully there will be a follow up volume. And soon.

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7 people found this helpful

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very theatre
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2016
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Very theatre

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robert j. baker
good stories about stage
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2019
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Good writing about interesting persons and developments in British stage and cinema.

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Miriam Sterling
Two Stars
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2017
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I thought it was boring.

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Harold L. Carr
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2016
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A gift but enjoyed.

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piso mojado
one should be paid to read in spite of recommendations on the jacket
Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2021
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compendium mostly of insider UK theater gossip, a waste of time and money

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Michael Freundt
Through a Playwright's Frosted Eye
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2017
Any child who has stumbled through childhood surrounded by unanswered questions, where adults were too occupied with their own demons to take notice; where one parent was largely absent in body and/or interest, and the other so shackled to society’s norms and buffeted uncomplainingly by the stings and shallows of the life they thought they had to lead, will relate to David Hare’s childhood in this, his 2015 memoir. David Hare’s father, Clifford Hare, a merchant sailor, was absent most of the time, while his mother, Agnes, conformed to the norms of the town of Bexhill, “a parody of suburbia”, between Eastbourne and Hastings on the Channel coast; a town described by James Agate as ‘bleak and purse-proud’ and used by the director Alfonso Cuarón as the location for those surviving Armageddon in his film Children of Men.

“Childhood is like going into the jungle without knowing what animals you will meet there.”

Saved from a fate he so easily saw on his horizon by cinema, the local theatre repertory companies, and his natural intelligence he weathered his upbringing and won a scholarship to Cambridge. Hare writes in a self-deprecating tone, which is endearing, but at the same time there is a feeling that he has done this to hide a sense of self-importance, as if his success and intellectual rise was inevitable. He wants to be liked. And steps in his making did seem to come easily and letter writing was one of his most successful modes of advancement: a holiday job in Los Angeles, a visit by Alfred Hitchcock, and a meeting with Peter Hall which had formidable repercussions.

It was at Cambridge in the 1960, ‘all wasps and no honey’ so said Kenneth Tynan, in a “self-deluded Britain” that Hare began his theatre-making, as both performer, director, and then as playwright.

“The very over-sensitivity which equips you to be a writer also makes being a writer agony.”

In 1969 while leading his Portable Theatre Company, Hare and co-founder Tony Bicât, had the idea of presenting, in their second season a play based on the history of evil and asked their new friend Howard Brenton, at the time working in the Royal Mint, to take it on. He eschewed the ‘history’ but kept the ‘evil’ in the character of serial killer John Reginald Christie, and set it in a pen made of chicken wire filled with old newspaper. Christie in Love “plays with the controversial notion that when Christie practised necrophilia, assaulting his dead women, he was, in his own eyes, expressing a kind of love.” Hare had only written one short play to fill in a gap in the previous program but Brenton’s “brilliant” play, directed by Hare, set Portable, and Hare, on a path of creating and presenting new plays.

“…my most important discovery about playwriting … Every line on dialogue, every exit and entry, every development of the story, every deliberate change of mood on the stage pleases or displeases the author for reasons they would be at a loss to explain. The mystery of style is exactly that: a mystery. Yes, of course, I could clean the play up. I could redraft. I could, if necessary, make the action more deft. I was perfectly capable of saying. ‘That scene’s working, but that one isn’t. That joke’s working, but that one isn’t.’ But to the basic question ‘Why is the play the way it is?’ I had no answer at all.” No matter what you WANT to write, “ultimately you are at the mercy of your imagination – what ever that might be”; a bit like Christie.

There are moments in everyone’s life when the wanting of something is far more powerful than the getting of it; and there are many times when our bodies and our imagination are at odds; the latter taking over from the former and causing a positive, or negative, but involuntary, outcome. A man knows when his body betrays his will with an unnecessary erection; a woman once was so attracted to Ted Hughes, she vomited, something she did not want to do; Marcel Proust wrote at the age of 18 that ‘Desire makes all things flourish, possession withers them’; and David Hare separates his wanting to write a play, from his imagination that finally finishes it. In this sense we are all victims of our imagination, which can give our lives succor, as in a creative individual like Hare, or destroy it, as in another individual like Christie.

Theatre “is about people, it is not about types. Shakespeare did not intend Macbeth to be an indictment of Scottish monarchy. Nor is the characterisation of Lady M misogynist.” Recently in the London Review of Books review of The Girl on the Train; the writer, a woman, was horrified that the novelist, a women, seemed to her, to hate women. Yes, the female characters are in turn, liars, drunks, traitors, and lay-abouts, but the story is about these women, not all women. Hare derides this “idiotic language of role models” as a symptom of the late 1988s but it continues today. He says, “…with the rising tide of programmatic wordsoup which would threaten the vigour and authenticity of theatre in the new century, I would have no patience. Work, when fully achieved, seemed to me a more powerful manifesto than manifestos.”

David Hare, now Sir David Hare, is a very British writer for stage and film with an impressive list of work over many decades: they include Knuckle (1974), Fanshen (1975), Teeth ‘n’ Smiles (1975), Plenty (1978), The Blue Room (1998), The Judas Kiss (1998), Stuff Happens (2004), South Downs (2011), The Moderate Soprano (2015). His Skylight (1995) play was presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company earlier this year. He also penned the screenplay for the 2002 film The Hours, among many others.

You can view all my book reviews at michaelkfreundt.wordpress.com where I blog about writing and reading.

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sally gordon
Three Stars
Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2016
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Ok. Not marvellous

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M. Gadd
I loved this book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2016
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I loved this book. Not only did it offer so much insight into Hare's life and work but it brought alive the social, cultural and political mores of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It told a story that I could relate to - middle class boy with artistic leanings moves his way through his surroundings as he searches (successfully in Hare's case) for the 'real' person inside of him. Beautifully written with very elegant sentences.

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Joel Greenberg
a fabulous adventure
Reviewed in Canada on December 24, 2015
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david hare's memoir is the kind of shared intimacy that renews one's faith in the infinite possibility of masterful language

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D. Clough
Hare's progress
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 21, 2016
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There was always something patrician about David Hare, even when he was one of the young dudes; those 70’s playwrights (Brenton Griffiths et al), whose romanticised vision of socialist revolution you felt, at least at the time, came from a genuine fire in their bellies. That fire fizzled in 1989, the blue touch paper unignited but I still miss it. It’s a rare commodity these days.
It’s predictable that the intimidatingly intelligent characters Hare creates are products of his own formidable intelligence but perhaps more surprising to learn that a professed self-hatred propelled him, at least through his early years. It’s harder to know if he still feels that way but, as his stature has grown, and he’s become more oracular, he’s certainly retained a high degree of self consciousness. The writing here is self-critical almost to a fault and some might think he has little reason for it.
Although he starts as an alienated teenager in a little coastal town his career path quickly accelerates and becomes that of a consummate insider, forefront and centre of a wave that carried him from Cambridge to The Royal Court and The National Theatre. In that context even his few failures gain a lot of attention.
I bought this book because it deals with a period when I admired Hare’s plays greatly and they set a standard for me. For details of those landmark early productions alone, their genesis and the back stage gossip, the book is worth buying. No doubt there’ll be further volumes but I think I’ll be stopping here.

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Pauline Butcher Bird
First part is the best part
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 26, 2015
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The first part of this book that relates to David Hare's childhood is the best part. I could feel extremely well his claustrophobia living with ordinary parents in 1950s England, parents who married hurriedly in wartime England and wished for nothing more than to live a quiet life and conform to their lower middle-class status. David's father was a steward on Cunard's liners and so is absent for 40-odd weeks of the year. Such separation leaves David with a sense of separateness that he never overcomes. He skims over his school years and sexual awakening - a strange omission given the detail later about his extra-marital affair. The rest of the book I found tedious - endless squabbles in England's theatre-dom and a roll-call of famous names, names that are given one sentence each. I skipped to get the human story, his marriage and three children by his long-suffering wife through to the death of his mother. Though he doesn't seem to notice it, David turns into his absent father and, as a result, does not do himself well.
Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa by Pauline Butcher

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Christopher J.W.Hawthorne
Look back in langour
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2015
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Cogently written this book is frank, honest and insightful. If you want to remember the cultural events of the 70s and 80s this book looks closely at what happened in those decades. Changes in social attitudes and how they emerged are explored. A good read indeed.

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5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book

5.0 out of 5 stars a fabulous adventure

4.0 out of 5 stars Hare's progress

3.0 out of 5 stars First part is the best part

5.0 out of 5 stars Look back in langour

I loved this book

a fabulous adventure

Hare's progress

First part is the best part

Look back in langour