TV Plays

There were two plays on TV this week: one was superb, the other was OK. You'd have thought maybe that the superb one would have been "Page 8" by Sir David Hare but no, this was the OK one; the superb one was "Field of Blood" (first episode only so far). Why was this? After all David Hare is one of our great living playwrights - so people keep telling us. His plays have become school text books. He has written some famous plays like... er... can't recall a single title. Then he is a "sir" - surely they don't throw those honours around like smarties at a kids party. Well on the strength of "Page 8" maybe they do because whie it was watchable, though tiresome, it was a play that depended on one's point of view about politics. In short, it was a play which pointed a finger of guilt at Tony Blair. The Left, playwrights like Pinter and Hare, journalists like Polly Toynbee and the rest cannot forgive Blair for two things: winning a few elections with a policy that had abandoned Clause 4; joining Bush in the warmongers saloon and invading Iraq. While Blair isn't mentioned in "Page 8" he's there in spirit and in body in the shape of the Prime Minister in the play played by Ralph Fiennes (a nasty piece of work if ever there was one). You should, I believe, try to be fair minded to both sides of an argument when you are a playwright; Hare is one-sided and so he's preaching to the already convinced.
The strange thing about the comparisions of "Page 8" with "Field of Blood" was that though one would have expected the Hare play to have the best dialogue, it turned out that the Scottish play set in Glasgow really sparkled with wit and humour and vibrancy. Hare's dialogue was almost sermon-like: people kept repeating what had just been said, there was no life in the words, can't recall a single memorable line. In the other play there were great lines like (about a fattish girl junior journalist) "she's no stranger to a macaroon".
Can't wait for the second episode.