Skylight
By David Hare
Directed by Roger Hodgman
The Wharf Theatre, Sydney, until June 15
Reviewed by Brendan Doyle
This Melbourne Theatre Company production of British left-wing playwright David Hare's latest play is one of the theatre highlights of 1996.
Hare's other successes here were Teeth 'n' Smiles, about the selling of a rock band, Plenty, made into a film by Fred Schepisi, A Map of the World and Racing Demon. He has written "public plays" which are openly political and "private plays" which explore the connection between the individual and society. Skylight is of the latter variety.
The action takes place over the course of one cold night in a small, depressing flat in East London, where Kyra (Helen Buday) ekes out a miserable living as a teacher in a disadvantaged school. This is England, now, but it could be Australia. Her former employer and lover Tom (William Zappa) arrives unannounced after three years, after his wife Alice dies of cancer.
Tom, from a working-class background, has made good and now runs a chain of hotels and restaurants. He wants Kyra to take up again where they left off before Alice's death. But although she goes to bed with him for old times' sake, their social and individual values have changed beyond hope of reconciliation.
Tom is 20 years older than Kyra, daughter of a solicitor, who got her first job at 18 in Tom and Alice's restaurant, immediately became one of the family and was truly happy. Alice's friend, she also became Tom's lover, and the three of them settled into a comfortable life — until Alice found out the truth. Kyra ran away, became a teacher and discovered another world, where people scrounge for a living, where kids spit at teachers and have no self-esteem, where poverty and unemployment are the norm.
"How can you teach those ungrateful bastards when you could be lecturing at a university?", Tom asks. "If I don't do the dirty work, who else will?", Kyra answers. "But how can you live like this?", he asks again, looking around the freezing, depressing room. "It's how most people in Britain live today", she says.
Kyra has deliberately thrown in her lot with "the dregs of society", according to Tom. She is a dedicated teacher, working to improve a rotten system. Although she pricks Tom's conscience for not treating others humanely any more, including his own son, Tom admits he is committed to the good life and expanding his business. Their world views don't intersect any more.
The skylight of the title refers to the very expensive room Tom built for Alice to die in, with a vast skylight for her to see the trees from their large, leafy home, well insulated from the poor.
Hare's play exposes the contradictions of a society in which Tom, who has risen out of the working class, now despises the poor, while Kyra has chosen to work with the lowliest. This is not simplistic agitprop theatre. Hare is asking us to judge complex and difficult things, to judge two people whose motivations and moral values are confused. As Brecht said, it is hard to be good in a rotten society.
"I have an historical view", writes Hare, "which is that people are who they are because of the time and the political factors at work ... It's not my brief to put forward a sort of program of political change." Instead, he appeals to our sense of justice and humanity. And to that extent, Skylight is an outstanding play of our times.
This production will later tour Victoria and Adelaide.