About the Play:

Skylight was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

Skylight has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Skylight is a full length drama by David Hare. A young schoolteacher receives an unexpected visit from her former lover, a successful and charismatic restaurateur whose wife has recently died. As the evening progresses, the two attempt to rekindle their once passionate relationship only to find themselves locked in a dangerous battle of opposing ideologies and mutual desires. Can they find their way back to each other, or has the time for their tumultuous romance reached its end?

Skylight is about the one who got away. An unexpected knock at the door on a deep winter night brings the past rushing back into Kyra's apartment. She is surprised to see the son of her former lover at her apartment in a Northwest London slum. He hopes she will reconcile with his distraught, now widowed, father. Tom, a restless, self made restaurant and hotel tycoon, arrives later that evening, unaware of his son's visit. After three years apart, Tom has come to reclaim his former mistress following the death of his wife. Though the current of their desire still runs strong, time has carved them into very different people. Kyra, who was his invaluable business associate and a close family friend until his wife discovered their affair, has since found a vocation teaching underprivileged children. Is the gap between them unbridgeable, or can they resurrect their magnetic relationship? Skylight explores the challenges and enlightenments of bringing two polarized worlds together. Broadway and the West End applauded this intensely clear sighted and compassionate play about a love affair.

Skylight premiered in 1995 at the Royal National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre and transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End of London. It won the 1996 Olivier Award for Play of the Year and the Guardian's coveted Best New Play award and then went on to become one of the most internationally successful plays of recent years. Winner of the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, it has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 2 male

What people say:

"David Hare's luminously beautiful and wildly truthful Skylight is deeply and truly about people... It is a fascinating play [that] tears at the heart... Theatre going today doesn't get much better than this." — New York Post

"The play of the decade." — Spectator

"Some plays dissolve with time. David Hare's Skylight actually seems to have got richer since its premiere in 1995." — The Guardian (UK)

"There are times in the theatre when you suddenly find yourself in the grip of silence. There is no fidgeting or coughing no shifting about in seats: the audience's attention is so tense, it is almost palpable. This is because it can sense that what is happening on the stage is both thrilling and dangerous: a fight to the death, or the dawning of salvation. David Hare's new play, Skylight, is punctuated by such moments. They are the signs that a dramatist of the first rank is writing at full stretch, in complete command of his material, undogmatic and unafraid, unforgiving but compassionate." — Sunday Times (London)

About the Playwright:

Sir David Hare is one of Britain's most internationally performed playwrights. He was born in Sussex in 1947. A writer of social themes, David Hare has been Associate Director of the National Theatre in London since 1984. He was knighted in 1998 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.