SOURCE: “Political Drama,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLII, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 121-29.

In the following excerpt, Hornby complains of Hare's confused politics and “bad aesthetics” in The Secret Rapture.

David Hare is a playwright I wish I could like, but I can’t. There are far too few political playwrights in Britain or America these days; the smug conservatives who have run both countries for the past decade certainly need the challenge that Hare provides. As I am writing this, I can look out the window of my apartment and see a homeless person, sleeping or perhaps dead, lying under a few meager blankets to ward off the twenty-degree cold. In the past, there would have been popular dramatists like Brecht or Shaw, or Odets or Miller, to denounce this outrage, to make this person visible and human for us and our leaders. Instead, most playwrights today (especially...