ABSTRACT
As one of Britain's most successful playwright-polemicists, David Hare has been lauded for his ability to attract largely mainstream, middle-class audiences to productions that often tear at the very fabric of bourgeois English life. Wagner's Ring cycle, Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Peter Brook's Mahabharata rival Hare's trilogy in terms of epic length, a quality the playwright praises. In addition to being chronologically the center of the trilogy, Murmuring Judges may be seen as a kind of fulcrum for the entire project, balancing what came before, Racing Demon, and what was to follow, The Absence of War. The problems Murmuring Judges has with realistic character and theme development seem to stem from Hare’s working method on the project. Murmuring Judges, like many of Hare’s plays, prescribes certain visual elements and production techniques. While the play does bear many similarities to political events in Britain, and certainly aims its share of broadsides at both leading political parties, it generally transcends simple immediacy.
