Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a statement of departure
- 1 The sixties revolution
- 2 Stepping into the past
- 3 A turning over
- 4 The people's war and peace
- 5 Sense of an ending
- 6 The foundry of lies
- 7 Dreams of leaving
- 8 Drawing a map of the world
- 9 All our escapes
- 10 Painting pictures
- 11 The moment of unification
- 12 Strapless
- 13 Heading home?
- 14 Stepping into the future
- Conclusion: a statement of arrival
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
13 - Heading home?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a statement of departure
- 1 The sixties revolution
- 2 Stepping into the past
- 3 A turning over
- 4 The people's war and peace
- 5 Sense of an ending
- 6 The foundry of lies
- 7 Dreams of leaving
- 8 Drawing a map of the world
- 9 All our escapes
- 10 Painting pictures
- 11 The moment of unification
- 12 Strapless
- 13 Heading home?
- 14 Stepping into the future
- Conclusion: a statement of arrival
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
As the 1990s dawned, David Hare stood on the verge of something new: he had taken on Shakespeare and reclaimed tragedy. Heading Home was, however, the first film for television in a decade he made for the BBC and, screened in January 1991, it appeared to be taking him back to the forms and agenda of the history plays of the 1970s. Although Heading Home filled in the gaps left in Hare's previous accounts of post-war history, it also comprised another go at the themes of love and existentialism which had stood at the heart of Dreams of Leaving and concluded his discussions of the eighties on the purpose of art. In that sense it provides a reconciliation of the two major strands in his two decades of writing for the national stages.
At the opening of Heading Home, an unseen speaker identifies a special moment from her own past. As in Dreams of Leaving and Saigon, a voice self-consciously looks back to earlier times from a position of relative age and wisdom, but in this case the view is neither chronological – since the moment in question is identified as being too far on – nor part of an everyday occurrence. ‘That particular road was quite extraordinary, even at the time’ (p. 5) and what made it extraordinary was that it opened out so that ‘You saw the beach and the bay.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Plays of David Hare , pp. 189 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995