Charge of the Angry Brigade

The Broadway opening of yet another play from the London stage, David Hare’s The Secret Rapture, looks at first sight like evidence of the continuing health of the British theater. If you actually see the play, however, and witness its crudely didactic characterization, ramshackle construction, and infantile politics, it presents rather a different picture.

The Secret Rapture is, in fact, one more example of a strange and disturbing anomaly: in a couple of decades when intellectual fashion and voting patterns in Britain have swung dramatically to the right, not a single right-wing dramatist has emerged from the British subsidized theater. Anyone who attends new plays put on by the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, or the Royal Court might reasonably deduce that Britain is firmly in the grip of the “loony Left.”

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Christopher Tookey

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The Broadway opening of yet another play from the London stage, David Hare’s The Secret Rapture, looks at first sight like evidence of the continuing health of the British theater. If you actually see the play, however, and witness its crudely didactic characterization, ramshackle construction, and infantile politics, it presents rather a different picture.

The Secret Rapture is, in fact, one more example of a strange and disturbing anomaly: in a couple of decades when intellectual fashion and voting patterns in Britain have swung dramatically to the right, not a single right-wing dramatist has emerged from the British subsidized theater. Anyone who attends new plays put on by the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, or the Royal Court might reasonably deduce that Britain is firmly in the grip of the “loony Left.”