Review: David Hare’s The Blue Touch Paper, a Mordant Memoir of His Youth

The best praise a playwright can get, David Hare writes in his new memoir, “The Blue Touch Paper,” is for an audience member to come up and say, “The two hours flew by.”

It’s a tribute to Mr. Hare’s book that it clips along at similar speed.

You know who Mr. Hare is. His many plays include “Plenty” (1978), a satire about postwar disillusionment in Britain, and “Skylight” (1995), which won this year’s Tony Award for best revival in a production that starred Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan and featured Ms. Mulligan’s onstage preparation of a fragrant spaghetti Bolognese dinner. His screenplays include “The Hours” and “The Reader,” for which he was nominated for Academy Awards. NY Times