Near the very beginning of this year, I walked out of a terrible, terrible new play by David Hare at the Royal Court called The Vertical Hour, and now, near the end of this long year, I have walked out of another:  Gethsemane at the National.  Lesson learned.

Here's the problem:  it's been a long-standing belief of mine that if you set out to write a fill-in-the-blank work of art - e.g. a political play, a socially conscious film, even yes a teenage novel - you're setting out to write a mediocre work of art.  No good work of art ever started from an impulse other than artistic.  You MUST tell a story you're burning to tell first and always; if you decide (like David Hare apparently does), hmmm, I want to write a play about the Labour Party donor scandal, I wonder if I can think of a story to shunt that into - then you've got the cart before the horse.

If you're actually an artist, your artistic impulses will respond to political, social, zeitgeisty ideas.  They'll all be there because, guess what?  You can't write subtext.  You can only write text, and trust that you're a good enough artist that subtext will be present because you've responded to truth in your story. 

Instead, David Hare's story and characters are dictated by the political points he needs to make, and as such, his plays fail completely as drama.  There aren't any people onstage; they're just walking opinions.  Gethsemane has no recognisable human beings, no believable drama, no jokes that don't feel stamped in my industry - just lots of not particularly fresh despairing liberal opinion.  It might make a good essay; it's a travesty as a play, because you don't give one damn about it emotionally.

Worse, his reputation is such that no seems willing to tell him, so they keep on coming.  People who couldn't plausibly exist shouting their way through problems you won't care about.  Ugh, never again.