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    A Study Guide for David Hare's "The Secret Rapture"
    A Study Guide for David Hare's "The Secret Rapture"
    A Study Guide for David Hare's "The Secret Rapture"
    Ebook58 pages48 minutes

    A Study Guide for David Hare's "The Secret Rapture"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for David Hare's "The Secret Rapture," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535839495
    A Study Guide for David Hare's "The Secret Rapture"

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      A Study Guide for David Hare's "The Secret Rapture" - Gale

      3

      The Secret Rapture

      David Hare

      1988

      Introduction

      In an article he wrote for the Listener just before The Secret Rapture opened in London in October 1988, David Hare revealed the source of the play’s curious title. In Catholic theology, the playwright explained, the ‘secret rapture’ is the moment when the nun will become the bride of Christ: so it means death, or love of death, or death under life. True to its origins, the play is filled with images of death, from the opening scene, in which a young woman keeps a vigil over the body of her dead father, to the climax, in which that same young woman is murdered by her obsessed lover. In between is a family drama rich with the symbolism and topical social criticism for which Hare has become well known in more than three decades as one of Britain’s most popular playwrights.

      Although the play’s characters and themes are rather complicated, its plot is quite simple. Isobel Glass is a humane, fairly successful small business owner. Her sister, Marion, is a self-centered, fast-rising politician in Britain’s Conservative Party government in the 1980s. When their father dies, Isobel is forced to assume the responsibility for their young, reckless, alcoholic stepmother, Katherine. Because of her love and loyalty for her father, Isobel allows Katherine and the others in the play to take advantage of her, and she quickly loses her boyfriend, her business, and ultimately her life.

      Hare wrote The Secret Rapture near the end of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ten years in office. During that time, Hare suggests, the rich got much richer, while the rest suffered more and more. Still, the play is much less about politics than some of Hare’s earlier work. The relationships between the characters, and Isobel’s singular morality, are the real driving forces. The Secret Rapture is available in The Secret Rapture and Other Plays, by David Hare, published by Grove Press in 1998.

      Author Biography

      David Hare was born on June 5, 1947, in St. Leonard’s-on-Sea in Sussex, on the southeastern coast of England. When Hare was a boy, his father was a ship’s purser on a passenger liner that sailed among England, India, and Australia. The time his father spent away from home left Hare alone with his mother and sister. Surrounded by women as a child, Hare developed an appreciation for the noble qualities he found them to have. A noticeable trend in his writing from the very beginning is the presence of strong female characters, such as those found in The Secret Rapture. The playwright’s first success, Slag(1970), as well as Plenty(1978), Wetherby(1985), The Bay at Nice(1986), Wrecked Eggs(1986), Strapless(1989), and Skylight(1995), all have strong, typically virtuous women characters. I’ve written about women a lot because my subject has often been goodness, Hare told interviewer Michael Bloom in American Theatre magazine. The idea of men being good seems to me to be slightly silly.

      Hare began his career in the alternative, or Fringe Theatre, movement of London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Fringe Theatre was different from the mainstream, usually government subsidized theatre of England. Fringe artists were interested in experimentation with dramatic styles; inexpensive production in nontraditional spaces, such as warehouses and apartment lofts; and the liberated, sometimes political, youth culture of the era. As a new artist on the Fringe scene, Hare earned a small salary as the literary manager for the Royal Court Theatre in 1969, where he also met some of Britain’s most experimental, antiestablishment new writers and actors and launched his own career as a playwright. Some of his earliest plays were filled with political criticism and satire. England’s Ireland(1972) is a collaborative documentary play about the political controversy and bloodshed caused by the English occupation of Northern Ireland. The Great Exhibition(1972) derives its name from its pathetic leading character, a world-weary, washed-out politician who has failed at his career and his marriage and, in a

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