(AGENPARL) – ven 04 ottobre 2024 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 4, 2024
Audible Announces
The Audible Original Release of
Beat the Devil
Written & Performed by Olivier Award Winner and Three-Time Tony Award Nominee
David Hare
Releasing October 24, 2024, Exclusively on Audible
NEWARK, NJ – October 4, 2024 – Audible, Inc., the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling, is pleased to announce the upcoming audio release of Beat the Devil, written and performed by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and BAFTA-winning director David Hare (Skylight, The Hours, The Reader). The Audible Original is set to release October 24, 2024, with Audible founder Don Katz serving as Executive Producer.
Beat the Devil is a raw, powerful first-hand account of contracting COVID-19 in its first wave, told by one of the most decorated artists of our time. On the same day that the UK government finally made the first of two decisive interventions that led to a conspicuously late lock-down, David Hare, celebrated playwright and screenwriter, contracted COVID. 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.
In August 2020, Beat the Devil’s world premiere production, starring Ralph Fiennes at the Bridge Theatre in London, marked the return of live, socially distanced indoor theater in the West End. In New York, Hare performed the monologue for a two-night engagement at the Public Theater in November 2023. Now, this astute commentary reflecting on an unimaginable time will be accessible direct to listeners’ ears across the globe.
Among his many accolades, David Hare has been called “our best writer of contemporary drama” (Sunday Times) and “Britain’s greatest living playwright” (Mail on Sunday). The Telegraph said that Beat the Devil “flung open the theater doors again with a heart-stopping flourish in David Hare’s most personal piece to date. It reminds us why Hare matters but also why theatre does – as a place to gather together to confront society’s darkest days and demons.”
David Hare said, “In early 2020, there was no prediction of what one day might look like, and how it might differ from the next, when experiencing COVID-19. The best way I knew how to explore this time was to write what became Beat the Devil. When this piece was first performed, it was for a socially distanced audience, and I’m grateful to Audible that this story will now be available to so many more. I hope listeners empathize with the rage and urgency I felt during this harrowing time, and find catharsis in the ultimate recovery.”
Don Katz said, “David Hare created an artful, historically profound monologue that provides a necessary revisit of the societal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As one of the world’s greatest living playwrights, David brings humor and humanity to a time of tragedy and within the intimate format of an Audible Original, listeners can peer deeply into the human condition. I believe David’s story could heal the broad disassociation left by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially now when we are still feeling the societal effects of that time.”
BIOGRAPHIES
DAVID HARE is a playwright and film-maker. He has written over thirty stage plays which include Plenty, Pravda (with Howard Brenton), The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy’s View, The Blue Room, Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens, The Absence of War, The Judas Kiss and Straight Line Crazy. For film and television he has written over twenty-five screenplays which include The White Crow, Licking Hitler, Dreams of Leaving, Saigon: Year of the Cat, Wetherby, Damage, The Hours, The Reader, Denial and The Worricker Trilogy: Page Eight, Turks & Caicos and Salting The Battlefield. In a millennial poll of the greatest plays of the 20th century, five of the top 100 were his.
DON KATZ is the founder of Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling that currently delivers 4 billion hours of audiobooks and Audible Original programs to listeners in 180 countries, in 47 languages. Audible’s catalog has grown from 3,000 titles in 1999, when Audible went public on NASDAQ, to more than 900,000 today. Audible listeners download an average of twenty audiobooks per year, confirming Don’s originating belief that Audible would become a daily habit. That habituation in turn created one of the highest-growth and most profitable business models in media history.
Since 2007, when Don directed Audible’s relocation of its global headquarters to Newark, New Jersey, programmatic social and economic innovations focused on “scalable, replicable, and transferable” efforts to redress urban equality have defined Audible’s public impact purposes. Audible programs spawned under Don’s leadership include Newark Venture Partners, which Don founded to plant “little Audibles” to advance Newark’s comeback story; the Audible Scholars internship program; the COVID food crisis response effort Newark Working Kitchens; and Live Local, which subsidizes Audible employees moving to Newark.
Before founding Audible in 1995, Don was a journalist and author for 20 years, writing five books and serving as contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Outside, Esquire, and other publications. His work won an Overseas Press Club award and a National Magazine Award, and his book Home Fires was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His two books about businesses, The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears (winner of The Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction) and Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World – were both New York Times best-sellers.
Don has served as the founding board member of Uncommon Schools and is on the board of the New America Foundation. Don graduated from New York University, where he studied with novelist Ralph Ellison.  He also holds an MSc Econ from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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