SOURCE: “In the Air,” in New Statesman & Society, June 21, 1991, p. 45.

In the following review, Wu admires the traditional dramatic ideas of Writing Left-Handed.

David Hare’s introduction to this collection of prose pieces written since 1978 is characteristically apologetic: “I am more at ease working through invented characters,” he admits. Writing Left-Handed is distinguished by its author’s fearless, and sometimes painful, desire to own up. In his student days, he was a “precocious and shallow young man”; discussing his relationship with his theatre audiences he admits that “it is our fault, not theirs, if we do not reach them with the things we have to say”; and the final essay confesses that: “I could not save my own life by plausibly acting one single scene.” Other pieces describe the various humiliations suffered by “one who is at home with risk. It makes me unafraid of being passionate.”

This...