Sir David Hare

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1:00at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4, in partnership with Montclair. Quite often, people say to me, I couldn't possibly have you to dinner. You're the chef of the River Cafe, and cooking for you would be overwhelming. That's how I feel about introducing Sir David Hare. How do you write for one of the great playwrights of our generation? Skylight, plenty, stuff happens, beat the devil, screenplays from movies, The Hours Damaged, The White Crow, to name a few. But I do think David and I do have much in common.

1:35We both like being hosts, me in the River Cafe, and David in his home where he understands the theater of sitting at a table. We both know that if food brings a table to life, so do the people around it. And for David, apparently, the ingredients for a good night are always carefully considered. We also share a love for what we do, and I think we're both defined by our commitment, investment in social and political issues of the day. In the past few days, I've spoken to many of the actors and directors who say that working for him was an honor and a huge part of their career. David's commitment to the written word on stage and screen is only rivaled by his love for sculptor Nicole Fari, his beautiful, brilliant wife of over 30 years.

2:23A commitment to our partners, mine to Richard Rogers, is yet another thing we share. Today we are here together in the River Cafe to talk about food, memories, theatre, travel, and more. It'd be natural to feel overwhelmed, but David makes it easy, and I just feel delighted and lucky to have him here. How kind of you. Thank you. I have just come from the River Cafe kitchen, and you said that you wanted to do the recipe for squid, rocket, and chili. And that had something to do with your memory of Rose, if we're talking about memories? Yeah, I knew Rose that winter, which you can... So Rose Gray, the co-founder with me of the River Cafe.

3:04You will know more about this than I did. I knew Rose Gray, and Rose went out to Tuscany one winter, not to start a restaurant at all, but to write a cookbook. And she went for six months to stay in the house of Henry Moore's daughter, Mary Moore. And so I knew her then, and she came back with, I can see the book in my head with all this sort of notebook full of recipes. And somehow, which I've never understood how, you managed to push her off course and to get her to open a restaurant and not write a cookbook. You don't want to write a cookbook, Rosie. You want to come and open a little cafe in Hammersmith.

3:41Did you say that to her? She'd always been a passionate cook when I first met her, before she went to Italy. And then I think she took that time to really get into the kind of cooking of Tuscany, to learn the recipes. And she was a beautiful draftsman. She could draw everything. We would sit at a table talking about a tomato, and she'd say, this is the one I want. and draw it, you know. And so I think she combined the illustrations with the recipes. And she came back and she went to work with Antony Carluccio. And so then when Richard had this space here, you know, we were looking for people to do it.

4:15And I called up Rose and said, do you want to do this with me? Should we do it together? And within a day we decided to take the space. So what year are you saying that is? 87. Well, talking to her in 86 probably and then opening in 87. But it was teeny tiny. And then the rest is history, you know. I chose this recipe because it's the first thing I ever had here. And I can remember, and I came with Julie Christie, and Julie said to me, have the squid. It's the best thing. Because she'd been before, and she told me to have the squid, and I had the squid, and I've never forgotten the taste, and I've just tasted it in your kitchen.

4:51It's exactly the same. 37 years later. It tastes exactly the same, which is an amazing achievement. So would you like to read the recipe that you chose? Six medium squid, 12 red chilies seeded and chopped, 225 grams of rocket and three lemons. Clean the squid and using a serrated knife, score the inner side of the flattened squid body with parallel lines one centimeter apart. Do the same the other way to make cross hatching. For the chili sauce, put the chopped chili in a bowl and cover with the oil. Place the squid scored side down on a hot grill, season and grill for one or two minutes. Yeah, but your grill's much nicer than most home grills.

5:37But even on any grill, it won't take very long. Turn the squid over. They will immediately curl up, by which time they will be cooked. You toss the rocket in olive oil and lemon. You plate with some of the rocket. You spoon the chili sauce on the squid and you serve with lemon. And there is actually no better lunch than that. It's sort of the best thing to eat between noon and one o 'clock on a weekday.

6:07The River Cafe is excited. We're opening the River Cafe Cafe. Come for a morning brioche and cappuccino, a plate of seasonal antipasti on the terrace, or an ice cream or aperitivo in the sun. We can't wait to open and we cannot wait to welcome you.

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7:14Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your home. Right now, you can shop up to 60 % off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Add a little... to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is a perfect destination for a quick weekend getaway. Explore charming small towns, browse unique shops, and discover restaurants the locals love. discoverlancaster.com makes planning easy with insider tips and upcoming events so you won't miss a thing plan your weekend trip at discoverlancaster.com forward slash soul sessions i want to talk about your childhood and growing up and going to the school where food was poisonous but i maybe we should just start at the beginning of your your time in london for now and then go back to that.

8:12Tell me about restaurants. Well, I very much agree with Michael Winner. I can't say that about many things. Yeah. But I very much agree with Michael Winner when he said, everyone thinks there's been a food revolution, but actually the food was better in the 1950s and 60s. And of course, that's not universally true, meaning by and large, food was terrible. Of course, it was in Britain. It was absolutely awful. But maybe because each restaurant was the first place that you tasted wonderful things. They seemed more wonderful because of that. In other words, when I first met Michael Winner, I was running the Cambridge Film Society and I was inviting him to show his film, I'll Never Forget What's His Name.

8:53And he took me to Quo Vadis. Well, I mean, if you've been a boy who'd been brought up in Bex Hill in the 1950s, then Quo Vadis was just beyond anything you could imagine. It was so delicious. And I wrote down a few of the other places that we used to go. Jimmy's, of course. Yeah, Jimmy's the Greek, right? Jimmy's the famous Greek restaurant. Was that the Greek when you went downstairs? Yeah, when you went downstairs and you had beef stew and chips for three and sixpence and it was so delicious. The Amalfi, which was the only place where you could get a pizza. This is before Pizza Express. Yeah.

9:25Are we talking 50s or 60s? We're talking 60s, right? 60s, that's early 60s. Young Friends, you had to drive down towards Stratford East and there was a Chinese restaurant down there called Young Friends that was so delicious. I can still taste it. And we thought nothing of driving for an hour down to the East End to go to Young Friends because it was the only place you could get really top rate Chinese food. I'm hoping everyone's salivating at the memory of this. The Ganges, of course, the Indian restaurant in what is now Chinatown, a Gerrard Street. And the Ganges was run by Calcutta communists.

10:02And the guy who ran it worked on a share of the take for everybody who worked in the restaurant so that everybody was paid equally regardless of whether they were a cook or a waiter or the owner or whatever your job was because they were communists and they cooked the best prawn party I have ever tasted in my life I will never taste a prawn party or as good as that again or maybe it's just it's because it's the first you know but you know I think there are writers actors musicians politicians, Paul McCartney for one, footballers, Dave Beckham, they really measure their success in terms of where they were able to eat, you know.

10:39So they remember the first time Beckham will say that he went to a restaurant where he didn't have to look at the prices first, or when Paul McCartney told him he had a good bottle of wine, and that it became a kind of seeing their career through the trajectory of where they were able to eat. It's so true, isn't it? But what I loved was all these places, you know, I'm going to remember Schmitz. You're too young to know Schmitz. Don't know Schmitz. Schmitz was Eastern European food in Charlotte Street where you could have, again, there was a lot of berf bourguignon and sort of those kind of stewy Eastern European food, very, very, very cheap and absolutely delicious.

11:21And that there's less of. That's what I think. There was that whole idea that the best food might be really cheap. Sometimes the best food was cheap, and sometimes it was just such a great experience to go to a restaurant where everybody was having fun, you know, that you didn't feel intimidated, you didn't feel that if you didn't know the wine list, everybody would be looking down on you, but that restaurants were fun. Did you go to restaurants as a child? Did your parents ever take you to restaurants? No. My dad was a sailor, and so basically it was austerity at home. And then one month of the year he'd come in with a big roll of notes that he, you know, he would come with an elastic band full of five-pound notes.

12:05We lived in austere, cheerless Britain, and he'd roll in with, you know, all this money. and he'd take us out to a steakhouse in Hastings on the front, which of course was run by Cypriots, as steakhouses then were. And we would have what would seem to us an unimaginably luxurious. And also because he was the purser on the ship, all this stuff would come to the house like a whole lamb. I mean, you know, off the side from P &O. And so ridiculous quantities of things you couldn't deal with would suddenly arrive in the house when there was no food, when he was away because he didn't leave much behind him.

12:49And your mother cooked for you every day? My mother cooked and she was Scottish. Did she work? Did she have to have a career? No. How many of you were there? How many of you? Me and my sister. Two, yeah. And when I divorced from my first wife, she said, but who's going to look after you? And I said, well, I'm going to look after myself. And she said, but the ironing, the cleaning, the cooking, who's going to do that? And I said, well, I'll probably have to do that myself, won't I? And my mother just couldn't understand. She just couldn't understand how a man could live alone because it's sort of, if that was possible, what was her life about?

13:21Because her life had been about looking about us. Yeah. And what did she cook for you? Stovey potatoes. What's that? Do you know that? Okay, well, I've looked it up since I said I was going to mention it. And apparently you can put anything you like. For instance, you boil the potatoes and then you pour over the fat from Sunday's joint over it. to make them taste, or you put the shreds of the remains in. But it's basically meat, vegetables, and potatoes boiled together. And that was... Was it good? Absolutely delicious. Yeah. Very, very good. It's a peasant dish. Yeah, nice. And Scottish food was very basic like that.

14:04And the beloved things were stovey potatoes, haggis, obviously, which is, you know, an acquired taste but I love it. And mince which I gather now is on posh menus. So your mother came from Scotland to Hastings. Yeah, she met my father during the war in Grinwick. He was in the Royal Navy during the war and so she was working in the Wrens and they met in Grinwick. It's just down the estuary from Paisley. Paisley is a suburb of Glasgow from which the famous Scottish playwright John Byrne came from there. And John writes brilliantly about Paisley. And Paisley is one of the roughest towns in Scotland.

14:48It is a really, really tough place. And it made my mother a very, very timid woman. She spent her whole life terrified, and particularly terrified of men, because she, getting home at Saturday night over the rolling drunks in Paisley, had made her very, very frightened. And so growing up, then you went to boarding school. I went to a school called Lansing. Oh, Lansing. Yeah, I know Lansing. And my contemporaries were three of us all entered show business. Tim Rice, who was a little bit older than me, and Christopher Hampton than me. So there's this extraordinary coincidence that all three of us were at school together.

15:24I have a friend who's a headmaster who says he's worked in many, many schools, but he has never seen food served to anybody as disgusting as the food that we were served at Lansing in the 1960s. I just remember curried eggs with a skin over them. I remember fish in white sauce with a skin over it. I remember everything with a skin over it. And I particularly remember that they put tea leaves in a sock and lowered the sock into an urn and poured boiling water into the urn and used a sock as a form of teabag. And it just is, it was primeval. Yeah. And you wonder why, because it must have been a school that encouraged, did it encourage you, three of you, to be involved in drama, the arts at all?

16:13We were lucky enough to be at an old-fashioned public school, which was going through a period of humanist revival. And we were encouraged, you know, we had an art film society in which we were looking at Bergman films and Fellini films and Antonioni films. And these were being shown to us at the age of 16. We had a couple, I had a couple of brilliant, enlightened teachers who did the classic thing of infusing you with love of French and German literature and English literature and the arts and drama and film. And we were just very, very lucky. But not food. Not food at all. So for food you had to go into Brighton.

16:53And you'd go into Brighton. I couldn't afford to go to English's, which was the fish restaurant. Do you know that one? Oh, God, you know nothing, Ruth. I know nothing. You know nothing. I know nothing. Teach me. Go on. I'm sitting here at an open vessel to be educated of. You have no idea how difficult it was to eat well. And then how satisfying it was to manage to eat well. because the basic diet of the British was disgusting. But I always say they came out of a war. They came out of rationing. Cut them some slack. I've just read a novel by Marganita Lasky, who was a sort of 40s intellectual, called The Lost Child.

17:35And it's about a man who goes from England to try and find his child in France in 1945. And France in 1945, everyone's eating absolutely wonderfully. And the first thing he says is, oh, my God, France was an occupied country under the Nazi rule, which, you know, suffered terribly during the Second World War. And yet there's all this gorgeous food. Whereas in London, by the end of the war, there was absolutely nothing left at all. The people were eating cabbages and turnips and barsets. Would you eat when you're writing? I can't eat before the theater. You can't? No. Before a play? Nobody, I haven't met, I've only met one person who could eat before, during and after and that was Emily Blunt.

18:18Otherwise, everybody says they can't eat before. You mean when she's actually performing? She has a hamburger like before she goes on and then she has a hamburger sometimes in the middle of between acts, yeah. She's an eater. That is absolutely extraordinary, isn't it? The advantage of running a travelling theatre which we did from 1968 to 1971 was you go to a regional city, you do the show, that by 9.30 there was nowhere to eat. Yes. Absolutely nowhere. So we always ended up in the gay club because every single city, I can remember the gay club in York, I can remember the gay club in Gloucester.

18:54You know, every city you went to, there would be a gay club. But was it quite closeted? Yeah, it was pretty closeted. It was usually downstairs. You'd usually go downstairs. And then there'd usually be red velvet and sort of, you know, a bit of decor. Yeah. And then down it, of course, would be the liveliest and most fun and most interesting place in the town. And it was the place where people who didn't go to bed at 10 o 'clock whiled away the hours till 1 or 2. And what was the food like at a gay club? They were okay. It was okay. They would serve dinner. Yeah, there'd usually be something you could eat that was decent to eat.

19:28And it was the same in London. There were actors' clubs in London that were gayish. They were predominantly gay. There were a couple in London where you were... And they were basically places where actors went to after the show. And they were very, very nice. And it made you feel you were part of a community and that you were part of a way of life and that you were all in it together. I can understand why an actor might not eat for the performance. As the writer, why wouldn't you eat? You were just too nervous? Because I'd throw up. Really, yeah. With nerves. And then after, you were able to go out?

20:06Because that's the thing, isn't it? You go out, you go out after you... Yeah, and I would say probably the career of Jeremy King is entirely based, isn't it? I mean, the Caprice and all those restaurants, Sheikis and that, they're entirely based on their reputation for being places where actors go. Because Jeremy always had that very simple philosophy that people go as much to stare at the other titers as they do to eat the food. And Jeremy King, again, who I probably knew right at the very beginning of when he first started. You know, he just worked out that if you could see actors, and in fact, you know, at the National Theatre, we always had the problem that nobody would go to that restaurant, that the restaurant was always a disaster.

20:51And I remember Jeremy was asked, what do you do about it? He said, let the actors eat their half price. And if the audience believes they will see the actors after the show, then they will go to that restaurant. If you go to the show and afterwards you see, I don't know, Tony Hopkins or Judi Dench, then of course it seems like a good restaurant. But if you go and it's just you and the wind whistling around you, it's not very cheerful. They say there's a good restaurant there now. It's very touchingly named the Lasden, which is named after Dennis Lasden. I have to be very careful about this because actually that restaurant, believe it or not, is where I first saw my wife.

21:31Did you see her across a crowded room? I did. Did you? I'd written a play called Murmuring Judges. Yes. And at the technical rehearsal, the leading lady's clothes were very poor. And I said to Bob Crowley, who was the designer, I don't think very much of what she's wearing. And Bob said, don't worry, I'm seeing Nicol Fari tomorrow. And I didn't know what that meant. I remember he said, I'm seeing Nicol Fari tomorrow, I don't know what that means. Then, of course, the leading lady, Alphonsia Emanuel, turned up the next day in the most dazzling clothes. And I said, oh, my goodness me, this Nicol Fari must be something.

22:12And Bob said, well, you'll meet her because we'll give her tickets for the first night. And so this is, I'm afraid, a humble brag that she wasn't going to come. But fortunately, I went on late night line-up the night before. Ah, late night line-up. Yeah. Oh, that. I know. and she saw me on television the night before and she went, oh, maybe I will go. Yeah, there you go. And so she went and there she was on the first night. And do you go to restaurants a lot now? No, we're hermits. You are, yeah. Well, because Nicole was a fashion designer and so when she was a fashion designer, she was out and about a lot.

22:50Now she's a sculptor and she just wants to stay at home all the time and I'm very, very happy watching television.

23:02If you like listening to Ruthie's Table 4, would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

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