David Hare, a Chart of the World

Introduction

In scale and scope, ''A chart of the World'' is Hare's most epic play yet nearer to ''Pravda,'' the Hare-Howard Brenton collaboration that has pursued it, than ''Plenty,'' which came before. The execution, one must report, departs much to be desired. The motivated beginning, glistening Shavian exchanges and pricelessly funny digressions (about subjects as diverse as Zionism, E. M. Forster, the prose in Newsweek and CBS' news main concerns) can't rather paper over the authorial gerrymandering needed to break characters, themes and dramaturgy into affirmation by the going last scene.

David Hare, A Map of the world: analysis

The play is split up into two acts. Act 1, view I is full of deictic markers making it clear that although Hare's stage directions show, "the scene should only be sketched in, not realistically complete," (1575 until the yells of the movie crew with their huge lights and 35rnm camera (171), vigilance is often drawn to the present context of the utterances. Thus, the individual features playing Stephen and Elaine rendezvous and talk about the on-going conference.

The beginning of the play furthermore directly sketches vigilance to a world currently in advancement through the use of deictic markers: the first phrases of the play are "The heat" and the answer "I know." The "heat" mentions to the present weather' "I" to the speaker, Stephen. Attention is drawn to a personal object on stage the publication; "There's not anything about us" (157), states Stephen "us" refers to the two speakers (are they famous?). As Stephen appears to admonish the composing Elaine states, "Is it any poorer than ours?"(158), proposing that they are writers/journalists. The description of the young female in the Newsweek item followed by Elaine's exclamation, "America!" also of course groups up the West/East antithesis, particularly as this is juxtaposed with references to the Senegalese gentleman at the conference who is now "raising his third point of order" (158). The absence of a waiter to serve drinks leads Stephen to lament "the perpetuation of poverty" in India and the fact that "people sleep on the pavement ... just lying there with rats running all over them" (158). Following on quickly from the Newsweek article, is America to be linked to intelligence and to success (the five year old genius, the admired movie and TV star, Mary Tyler Moore) and the East to inefficiency and poverty? Others will later contribute to this dichotomy; Peggy Whitton, for example, when she will describe her overnight move from being a philosophy major working in publicity to becoming an actress, she talks about "Easy America.

The dramatic rhetoric here is especially productive not just because of the profusion of deictic markers anchoring the talk in the present context but furthermore because the West/East antithesis set in motion from the starting is gaining momentum. Can a Westerner like Stephen agitate off his stereotypical conceptions of the East or will he habitually gaze at the world as Peggy states, 'in periods of this is ...