As the 1990s dawned, David Hare stood on the verge of something new: he had taken on Shakespeare and reclaimed tragedy. Heading Home was, however, the first film for television in a decade he made for the BBC and, screened in January 1991, it appeared to be taking him back to the forms and agenda of the history plays of the 1970s. Although Heading Home filled in the gaps left in Hare's previous accounts of post-war history, it also comprised another go at the themes of love and existentialism which had stood at the heart of Dreams of Leaving and concluded his discussions of the eighties on the purpose of art. In that sense it provides a reconciliation of the two major strands in his two decades of writing for the national stages.

At the opening of Heading Home, an unseen speaker identifies a special moment from her own past. As in Dreams of Leaving and Saigon, a voice self-consciously looks back to earlier times from a position of relative age and wisdom, but in this case the view is neither chronological – since the moment in question is identified as being too far on – nor part of an everyday occurrence. ‘That particular road was quite extraordinary, even at the time’ (p. 5) and what made it extraordinary was that it opened out so that ‘You saw the beach and the bay.’