PERSONAL POLITICS AT THE MARK TAPER.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Writer

Several years ago, as a graduate student at Oxford University, Robert Egan heard the new voice of British drama.

It belonged to a group of young playwrights, Egan says, ``who were doing this rough, politicized theater that really was intended to travel out to churches and school halls and the venues where the people were. That's why it was called `Portable Theatre.' ''

At that time, the mid-1970s, those angry leftie authors weren't exactly household names: Howard Brenton, David Edgar, David Hare.

But pretty soon, the ``new British drama'' had leapt across the Atlantic and into American consciousness.

Which is more or less where you'll find it on Wednesday night, when the Mark Taper Forum opens its 1997-98 season with Hare's latest, ``Skylight.'' Egan, the Taper's producing director, will helm the show.

Small in scale but elaborate in scope, the three-character chamber piece arrives in Los Angeles after a limited run last fall in New York that had critics groping for superlatives. ``Skylight'' also won Britain's prestigious Olivier Award in 1995.

Ironically, this extravagant praise has been heaped on a play that some consider one of Hare's least typical works. Whereas several previous dramas unfolded against dense political dioramas of the Chinese revolution (``Fanshen'') or dreary postwar Britain (``Plenty''), ``Skylight'' takes place in a tiny northwest London flat.

Here, a rich conservative businessman named Tom (Brian Cox) has come to pay a visit to his former employee and lover, Kyra (Laila Robins), now an idealistic schoolteacher. As the couple attempts a bittersweet reunion, the political tensions at the heart of modern England are played out in the emotional tug-of-war between Kyra and Tom.

Though ``Skylight'' doesn't flaunt its politics as plainly as Hare's other plays, Egan sees the difference mainly as one of focus.

``(People) think that his other plays have been very institutional plays, where the politics is forefronted, but I think David has always been good in writing about personal relationships. I think he's just forefronted the personal relationship more. He tissues together political motivation with much more subtle psychological motivation.''

Like most British playwrights of his generation, Hare, now 50, was influenced by John Osborne's ``Look Back in Anger'' (1956). When Osborne's central character, Jimmy Porter, vented his disgust at the moral hypocrisy of postwar Britain, it flipped the staid world of British drama upside down. Suddenly, young audiences began forsaking the classics to hear the words of new writers like Osborne and Harold Pinter. Later, they beat a path to the Royal Court Theatre to catch the latest by David Storey or Christopher Hampton.

Egan sees Hare's creation of ``Skylight,'' and particularly the character of Tom, as a sign of the playwright's maturation. Now that he's no longer an angry young man, but a middle-age establishment figure, Hare is visibly rethinking his own assumptions, Egan says.

``David started out as an extremely left-wing writer and thinker and really rejected the big institutional theaters in England as venues for his early work. And now he's making money, he's making films.

``So I think his own experience of being philosophically to the left and now being in an economic system that forces him, for better and for worse, into the marketplace, he's writing very honestly and very intelligently about those contradictions.''

But ``Skylight'' isn't a treatise on late-industrial capitalism. It's about betrayal, sexual morality, suffering and death, the expiation of guilt and the delicate act of balancing private and public loyalties.

That mixture, Egan says, is every bit as relevant to America in the Clinton years as it is to Britain in the Thatcher-Major-Blair years.

``I think almost everything in the play is almost totally applicable to the American situation. Look at President Clinton. He's certainly attempted to walk a middle line in terms of what people consider liberal politics and conservative politics.''

THE FACTS

The show: ``Skylight.''

When: Thursday through Oct. 26.

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

Tickets: Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Actress Laila Robins, who plays an idealistic schoolteacher, and director Robert Egan during rehearsal of David Hare's ``Skylight,'' opening Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum.