David Hare's Page Eight

They showed David Hare's 'Page Eight' on television. I was mesmerised. You would expect the acting to be superb and the story to be clever, but this was exceptional. So much of the story was understated that my head was buzzing with the effort of keeping up. At the end, I felt privileged to have seen it.

Reading the reviews and the comments was a depressing experience.

'Page Eight' is about trust and the difficulty of having trust between people and in systems. The actual events are incidental to that theme - it was a play, not a documentary. How do we trust? How do we trust the information that we receive that informs us who we should trust? Every scene had that edge: do you believe what that character says?

I feared the ending was going to be a cliche: the main male character leaves a painting with the female character and disappears. Would we have that shot of the painting dissolving into the real location and the two characters appearing in each other's arms? No. Instead, the female character looks at the painting and suddenly gasps at its significance. Hare assumes that the audience is already there - sadly, the reviews I read missed this completely.

There is so little intelligent drama on television, it seems a shame that Page Eight has not yet had the acclaim it deserves.