ABSTRACT
David Hare’s television play, Saigon: Year of the Cat, is a relatively minor work, but it is interesting in that it is an important political playwright’s treatment of the most violent political issue of our times, the Vietnam War. Since Saigon is included in the volume called The Asian Plays, it is, necessarily, seen in relation to Hare’s two other dramatic works about the East, Fanshen and A Map of the World. Saigon is about the English and Americans living in Saigon at the end of 1974 and in early 1975. For a political playwright writing about so political a subject as the last days of the war, Saigon is surprisingly quiet. Saigon: Year of the Cat was produced for British television and was first aired in 1983 in England; it has not been televised in the United States or Canada, although a video was released.
