David Hare’s Skylight: When the Political Becomes Personal

Resumen

David Hare (Bexhill, Sussex, England, 5th June 1947) is one of Britain’s most
political contemporary writers, together with Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. He is a socially
and politically committed author, and many of his plays denounce contemporary conflicts, as
the Palestinian, or the deterioration of the British public institutions due to the restraints
imposed by the government of the Conservative Margaret Thatcher. From the beginning of
his career, Hare’s plays had political aims. As he says in his collection of lectures on theatre,
Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, “My desire was to use the theatre to argue for political
change, and, at the start, to no other end. But early on it became obvious that the demands
of what you would wish to accomplish politically cannot be so easily reconciled with what is
artistically possible.” (22)
In his trilogy formed by Skylight (1995), My Zinc Bed (2000), and The Breath of Life
(2002), he presents an uncompromisingly objective commentary on the state of the nation.
The plays are all debates, issue-oriented that conjugate the “theatre of ideas” and the way to
attract the massive audience attention with an updating Shavian witty perspective. The aim
of this paper is to demonstrate how, in the play Skylight, Hare’s prototypical nature as a
political writer is dissembled under the mask of an unfulfilled love story, approaching the
socio-political theme form a more novel and intimate perspective. In order to achieve his objective, David Hare implicitly juxtaposes the character of a poor area primary school
teacher, Kyra, with the figure of Margaret Thatcher.
Kyra Hollis is a thirty-year-old primary school teacher; she lives in a threadbare flat
in the suburbs of London. But Kyra’s life was not always as tough as it is now. For six years,
she lived in the upper-class home of Tom Sergeant, wealthy fifty-year-old restaurateur,
along with his wife Alice and son Edward. Notwithstanding the idyllic relationship that the
four of them had during their living together, Kyra became Tom’s lover without his wife’s
knowledge of the affair. Abruptly, Kyra abandoned the house when Tom’s wife discovered
the swindle. The play is set several years later, when his wife dies of cancer; her son
Edward, seeking help for his father, goes to Kyra’s place. That same day, some time after
Edward’s visit, Tom also goes to her flat, accusing her of abandoning him, and giving rise to
the entire action of the play.