David Hare

Drama by David Hare in which Ralph Fiennes stars as the playwright, recounting his experience of contracting Covid-19 on the day lockdown was announced in the UK.

Marking Play for Today’s 50th anniversary, Drama Out of a Crisis is a compelling exploration of the series, its origins, achievements, controversies and legacies. Featuring a rich and surprising range of archive extracts and original interviews with many who created the series, including producers Kenith Trodd, Margaret Matheson and Richard Eyre, and directors Mike Leigh, David Hare and Ken Loach.

The story of Rudolf Nureyev, whose escape to the West stunned the world at the height of the Cold War. With his magnetic presence, Nureyev emerged as ballet’s most famous star, a wild and beautiful dancer limited by the world of 1950s Leningrad. His flirtation with Western artists and ideas led him into a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with the KGB.

6.5/10
6.7%

The intersecting stories of several different people of widely diverging ages and backgrounds. From STASI offspring to Oakland anarchists, the characters' landscapes are as varied as East Berlin, the Bolivian jungle, East Harlem walk-ups, and the California Redwoods. Based on the novel of the same name by Jonathan Franzen.

Griffin Dunne’s years-in-the-making documentary portrait of his aunt Joan Didion moves with the spirit of her uncannily lucid writing: the film simultaneously expands and zeroes in, covering a vast stretch of turbulent cultural history with elegance and candor.

7.4/10
8.9%

6.2/10
6.5%

In her garden in the Home Counties, leave-vote Eleanor wonders why the Brexit vote hasn’t made her happier.

7.5/10

Acclaimed writer and historian Deborah E. Lipstadt must battle for historical truth to prove the Holocaust actually occurred when David Irving, a renowned denier, sues her for libel.

6.7/10
8.2%

India is surging with global ambition. But beyond the luxury hotels surrounding Mumbai airport lies a makeshift slum, full of people with plans of their own. Zehrunisa and her son Abdul aim to recycle enough rubbish to fund a proper house. Sunil, twelve and stunted, wants to eat until he’s as tall as Kalu the thief. Asha seeks to steal government anti-poverty funds to turn herself into a ‘first-class person’, while her daughter Manju intends to become the slum’s first female graduate. But their schemes are fragile; global recession threatens the garbage trade, and another slum-dweller is about to make an accusation that will destroy herself and shatter the neighbourhood.

The second movie in David Hare's Johnny Worricker trilogy. Loose-limbed spy Johnny Worricker, last seen whistleblowing at MI5 in Page Eight, has a new life. He is hiding out in Ray-Bans on the Caribbean islands of the title, eating lobster and calling himself Tom Eliot (he’s a poet at heart). We’re drawn into his world and his predicament when Christopher Walken strolls in as a shadowy American who claims to know Johnny. The encounter forces him into the company of some ambiguous American businessmen who claim to be on the islands for a conference on the global financial crisis. When one of them falls in the sea, their financial PR seems to know more than she's letting on. Worricker soon learns the extent of their shady activities and he must act quickly to survive when links to British prime minister Alec Beasley come to light.

6.5/10

Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan feature in David Hare’s Skylight, directed by Stephen Daldry, broadcast live from London’s West End by National Theatre Live.

8.5/10

David Hare concludes his trilogy of films about MI5 renegade Johnny Worricker with another fugue on power, secrets and the British establishment. Johnny Worricker goes on the run with Margot Tyrell across Europe, and with the net closing in, the former MI5 man knows his only chance of resolving his problems is to return home and confront prime minister Alec Beasley.

6.6/10

Johnny is a long-serving MI5 officer. His boss dies suddenly, leaving behind an inexplicable file which threatens the stability of the organisation.

6.9/10
9.3%

May 1919. Indy is in Paris working as a translator during the peace conference following the end of the Great War. He meets up with T.E. Lawrence once more but finds his ideals have changed a lot since the start of the war. Indy then decides to finally head home to Princeton even though it means having to face his father. He gets reacquainted with his childhood friend Paul Robeson, who becomes the subject of racism as they visit New York city.

7.3/10

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.

7.6/10
6.3%

A recovering alcoholic becomes involved with his boss's wife, a former cocaine addict.

5.5/10

Nobel Lecture delivered on video by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter (1930–2008), who was at the time hospitalised and unable to travel to Stockholm to deliver it in person.

"The Hours" is the story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.

7.5/10
8%

British film-maker Alan Clarke was championed by the likes of Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Ray Winstone - Stephen Frears even called him the best. And yet Clarke only ever made 3 feature films. This documentary explores the life and career of an exceptional director - Alan Clarke.

6.8/10

In this one-man Broadway production directed for the stage by Stephen Daldry, acclaimed screenwriter-playwright David Hare recounts his eye-opening journey to Israel and Palestine.

Jack and Judy are husband and wife, and Howard is Judys father. They live in some fictional undemocratic and repressive country, and tell us a story about their lives, mostly from Jack's point of view.

6.1/10
6.5%

Political drama written by David Hare and starring John Thaw and based on Labour's disastrous 1992 election campaign. Labour leader George Jones battles with his party on the campaign trail of a general election.

7.4/10

Upon her father's death, a woman comes into emotional and psychological conflict with her young lover, her overbearing sister and her alcoholic stepmother.

6.4/10

The life of a respected British politician at the height of his career crumbles when he becomes obsessed with his son's lover.

6.8/10
7.8%

The story of a woman who falls in love with two very different men in post World War II London.

7.6/10

An expatriate American doctor in London allows herself to lighten up when her freewheeling younger sister and a mysterious man enter her life. Her inhibitions released, the beautiful doctor learns that freedom has its own price.

5.6/10
4.4%

Clara Bell is a busy Euro MP with a husband and child at home and a high powered career - but on a trip to Paris her ordered existence is overturned by a murder and a chance encounter.

6.2/10

A series of dramas featuring staged theatre plays.

7.3/10

The mysterious death of an enigmatic young man newly arrived in the suburb of Wetherby releases the long-repressed, dark passions of some of its residents.

6.8/10
6.7%

David Hare's account of a one-time French freedom fighter who gradually realizes that her post-war life is not meeting her expectations.

6/10
5.6%

The year is 1974, and Barbara Dean (Judi Dench), a British assistant manager in a foreign bank in Saigon, begins a relationship with American Bob Chesneau (Frederic Forrest). She quickly realises that he works for the CIA and he knows that the fall of South Vietnam is very near.

6/10

William came to work in Fleet Street in 1971. London meant girls, as many girls as he could find. Then he met Caroline and so it began, that very strange summer ... Caroline said the best of her life.

Licking Hitler is a television play about a black propaganda unit operating in England during World War II.

Through the story of a single family, Brassneck traces a history that parallels the Labour Party's advent to power in 1945 through to the property speculation of the 1960s and the disillusionment with the Labour government in the early 1970s. Like most of the early work of the writers, David Hare and Howard Brenton, committed radical (if not revolutionary) socialists throughout the 1970s, it is a satirical attack on capitalist greed and corruption, full of savage, and often disturbing, humour.

The conflict between a judge who sees himself as a creative and skilful protector of democracy, and his daughter, who sees him in a totally different light.

Ralph Fiennes is joined in dress rehearsals as he discusses his involvement in and the themes relating to David Hare’s brand-new play Straight Line Crazy.