Out of the Margins

“A friend once said Skylight is one of the most tender and forgiving plays ever written – I hope so – that’s my aim.” 

David Hare’s pivotal 1995 drama depicts the two faces of Britain, both scarred by the Margaret Thatcher era. He is Tom Sergeant, a successful restaurateur in late middle age. She is Kyra Hollis, in her late 20s, a maths teacher in a money-starved East End school. (Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan played them when the production was last on in 2014.) They were lovers for six years; she left him when his wife discovered their affair. Three years after his wife's death, they come together – and apart. It's a heated night in a freezing flat. 

This first edition paperback has been generously annotated in both blue and black ink, and signed by the author. There are long paragraph notes on all the blank pages at the beginning. David talks of spending an evening with the characters “as if they were friends or family” and his influences for writing the play, the private versus political and how he came to write his first play set in just one room. 

David Hare reveals what the play nearly got called as well as what didn’t make it to the previews and other productions. He reflects on changes in the audience reaction from the first production to 20 years later. At the end of Act One, they “are always thrilled to see them back together. But then so am I.” He is self-aware: “I was going through a phase of crazily detailed stage instructions, perhaps because I’d only recently stopped directing my own plays, so I became nervously over-explanatory”. He notes how the play was written at the time, the period jokes that got in the script, and the people he knew who influenced the play, not to mention his hometown, Bexhill. 

Skylight received the 2004 Olivier Award for Best New Play, the 2004-5 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play, and two Tony Awards for production.