SOURCE: “Big Names and Prize Winners,” in North American Review, Vol. 279, No. 1, January-February, 1994, pp. 14-9.

In the following review, King offers a positive evaluation of Hare's trilogy—Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence of War.

Throughout his prolific career as author of stage, screen and television plays, David Hare, an avowed secularist, has dramatized characters making moral choices in an amoral world. The characters are not always morally aware, much less sensitive to the values that their words evoke and their actions create, but Hare surely is. He deliberately displays people in ambiguous situations in Plenty (1978), asks the audience “to make up its own mind” and to “learn something about its own values.” In the film Wetherby, a suicide laments the loss of the “good old words” that had “a sort of conviction which all this modern apparatus of language now lacks.” In most of his works...