Beat the Devil

Covid-19 seems to be a sort of dirty bomb, thrown into the body to cause havoc.



On the same day that the UK government finally made the first of two decisive interventions that led to a conspicuously late lockdown, David Hare contracted Covid-19. Nobody seemed to know much about it then, and many doctors are not altogether sure they know much more today. Suffering a pageant of apparently random symptoms, Hare recalls the delirium of his illness, which mixed with fear, dream, honest medicine and dishonest politics to create a monologue of furious urgency and power.



David Hare's first full-length play was produced in 1970. Since then he has written over thirty stage plays and thirty screenplays for film and television. In a millennial poll of the greatest plays of the twentieth century, five of the top hundred were his.