David Hare's Teeth 'n' Smiles: A Drama of Disintegration

Abstract

David Hare (b.1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed, contemporary British dramatists. A playwright, director and filmmaker, he has written more than thirty plays for the stage and seven original screen plays for cinema and TV (Susan Emerling, p.1). He began his dramatic career in the late sixties. Along with such dramatists as Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths, he writes in the aftermath of the "Angry Young Men" tradition of John Osborne. It is a well-known fact that the element of anger continued in the drama of the 1960s and became even more radicalized after the social, cultural and political unrests of 1968 by the dramatists of the "second wave" to whom Hare belongs (John Russell Taylor, p.14). Setting his plays in a variety of microcosmic societies, Hare exposes the inadequacies of capitalism and imperialism and the decay of civilization in England. The societies he portrays, ranging from an isolated girls' school in Slag (1971) to a Chinese village in Fanshen (1976), parallel the problems of his country and demonstrate the impact of individual lives of recent English history. In this respect, Ronald Hayman remarks that Hare's plays invariably chronicle the state of British society and "depicted England in state of moral collapse."(Hayman & et al., p.6).