Paris By Night and The Secret Rapture appeared in the same year (1989). At the centre of both was a phenomenon of eighties Britain – the successful Tory woman politician. Because of this, they appeared to be companion pieces, one on film, the other on the stage of the National Theatre, as Licking Hitler and Plenty had been a decade before. In fact, however, Paris By Night is a thriller written shortly after Wetherby and delayed by a turbulent production process. The Secret Rapture is quite a different sort of play, Hare's closest point yet to tragedy, which marks his own moment of unification with his theatrical inheritance.

Paris By Night

As the titles to Paris By Night are pieced together like a jigsaw on the screen, the camera moves down a long wood-lined corridor towards a woman sitting alone. Over romantic music and a babble of voices, we hear the distinctive keywords of parliament promising and insisting on ‘Order, order’. Where Archie Maclean in Licking Hitler was disrupting the country house setting by invoking the audience as loyal Germans, we are this time apparently firmly inside the corridors of power.

As the words of the title are finally spelled out, the camera comes to rest on a face and Clara Paige is revealed at the heart of the coming story. Where Susan Traherne in Plenty could respond to the stultifying code of manners of Sir Andrew Charleson's Foreign Office only with hysteria, Clara Paige is shown into the minister's inner sanctum to be given an assignment in Europe.