Hare claimed that Prauda exhausted his impulse to write on large public themes and he concentrated for the following five years on plays in the private tone of voice of The Bay at Nice and Wrecked Eggs, of The Secret Rapture, of Strapless and of Heading Home. Having concluded his own reclamation of tragedy, however, Hare turned his attention outward again and embarked on his most ambitious theatrical project – to write a trilogy on the great British institutions of the Church in Racing Demon (1989), the Law in Murmuring Judges (1991) and the State in The Absence of War (1993).

Racing his own demon

Racing Demon begins in the interrogative. Unlike Wetherby, however, this does not mark the start of a thriller and a mystery to be solved. Kneeling in a darkened church, the Revd Lionel Epsy is beseeching, ‘God. Where are you?’ This is direct address of a very special kind – prayer. The question is not ‘Does God exist?’ but where he is to be found in the context of the inner city. He is presumed to be there and this is not a question of whether to believe, but how to believe and what, if any, is the value of belief. It is for this doubt that Lionel has an uncertain future in the church, but David Hare has a far from uncertain future in the theatre.