An award-winning text by cult British writer, screenwriter and director David Hare, The Sky Above the Bed explores the complex and dramatic relationship between Xavier, a wealthy entrepreneur and widower, andElisabetta his former lover, a teacher in a suburban school, who lives in avery modest house in a working-class neighborhood. Elisabetta, who had lived in his house for a time, had left when his wife, at the time of their still-living affair, discovered the bond between the girl and her husband. Three Years after her sudden and silent escape, and a year after the death of his wife, the gap between the two seems to have become unbridgeable:she reads books on the bus, he is an unhappy father of a son on whom he spends his money. She is involved in the rehabilitation of young, precarious pupils, embodying a certain militant left, he drives around, lives in a mansion in the green, has managed to get his own chain of restaurant companies listed on the stock market, in short reflects the most dynamic type of a new entrepreneurial-conservative class. The text recounts the one-night-only encounter between the two former lovers, a night in which boththe erotic passion of yesteryear and ideological differences are rekindled,combined with an overwhelming sense of guilt that will once again leadthem to a lacerating yet inevitable separation. It is a meeting but at the sametime an irremediable disagreement between two solitudes, between two worlds, two ages, between his conformist culture and her nonconformity.David Hare is one of the greatest British authors of our time and also the most controversial-Declares Luca Barbareschi-The Sky Over the Bed is a beautiful story that while being an extraordinary introspection of a man-woman relationship, manages admirably to become a political statement about what is the psychological clash between political correctness and logical rational thought. He is a practical but intellectually honest man.She reflects Hare’s soul; she is the character with whom he identifies. The Author’s view of these two characters is not one of judgment. True wisdom lies in understanding the two characters. An exponent of a new generation,Hare entrusts Xavier’s son with the task of mediating between the loneliness of two former intimates now so conceptually distant and invoking some solidarity that, in his young eyes, prescinds from the barriers that have arisen between her welfare progressivism and the prototypical business culture represented by the father figure. Skylight was originally produced by the National Theatre in 1995, before transferring to the West End andBroadway, and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. In1997 with the production that staged the play on Broadway, Skylight also won the Tony Award for best revival of a play
