David Hare

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0:28Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading artistic figures discuss the influences and experiences that inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the playwright, screenwriter and director Sir David Hare, a writer for whom the political and the personal are deeply entwined. He made his name at the National Theatre with Plenty in 1978, a play which transferred to Broadway and was also adapted for a film starring Meryl Streep. In the 1980s, he became known as Britain's preeminent state-of-the-nation playwright, with racing demon, murmuring judges, and the absence of war examining the Church of England, the judiciary, and party politics.

1:09He tackled the international geopolitics in Via Dolorosa about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the invasion of Iraq with Stuff Happens and The Vertical Hour. His film screenplays for The Hours and The Reader saw him twice nominated for Academy Awards. David Hare was knighted in 1998 for services to theatre. David Hare, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. You were born in St Leonard's in East Sussex in 1947, and you lived there until you were about four or five years old, and then you moved a short way along the coast to Bexhill-on-Sea. And Bexhill is your first choice that you've made for This Cultural Life.

1:47Why Bexhill? I think Bexhill is the most significant influence in my life. There was no such thing as post-traumatic stress disorder when the Second World War was fought. But Bexhill was full of men who had fought in the Second World War and didn't know why they were feeling so uncomfortable. There were a lot of traumatized men, and all they wanted in the town was peace and quiet. And that went with a sort of lower middle class feeling about respectability. The code was, you know, don't smoke in the street, women not allowed to wear trousers, don't push washing out on Sunday. All societies have codes.

2:23But this was a particularly repressive one that was about respectability. There was a lot of sexual repression. Obviously, if anybody was remotely heterodox, then they were in trouble in Bexhill. There was one black person in a town of 25 ,000 people. So you couldn't help noticing that there was a distinctly conformist heir. And so if you were brought up there, your own imagination was really all you had. Tell me about family upbringing. Your father was a sailor, wasn't he? So he was away 11 months of the year. And so my mother brought us up. What happened in the month that he was back? The month that he was back, he had loads of money in a roll of notes.

3:03And he would come and we would enjoy a quality of life completely unlike the quality of life we enjoyed the rest of the year. And he expected us to be grateful for this. He'd be taking us out for steak and chips at the Star Cafe in St Leonard's. And that would be, you know, a great treat. He also, because he was a purser on a P &O ship, he was sent a lot of free gifts, like a whole lamb would arrive or pineapple chunks would arrive from Hawaii, stuff that fell off the boat, so to speak. And stories of the world, I presume. It's amazing how provincial my father was considering that he sailed the world.

3:39And the other thing I have to add is that he was completely indifferent to his children. No interest in my sister, no interest in me. And I think, by the way, that's why, as we talk on, Various people have been father figures in my life because I didn't really have one. Well, I was going to say, what effect did your father's absence have on the personality that was forming in the young David Hare? I think it was more that my mother was adrift in the world and it was a world she feared. She'd come from Paisley, which is a particularly rough town outside Glasgow, just five miles from Glasgow. and she'd moved to the south and she still regarded the world as extremely dangerous and her life was full of fear and I've had to spend a lot of my life trying not to be frightened because I inherited from her a sort of feeling that the world might be terrifying.

4:32So when I became a playwright later, there was one side of her that was very proud because she herself adored the theatre but the other side was extremely fearful meaning he's put his head above the parapet and really he's drawing attention to himself, he's showing off and those are lower middle class crimes. Was it a happy childhood though looking back? I didn't feel happy at the time but I think that it has served me in very good stead partly because it left me not a snob. In other words, when people attacked Margaret Thatcher calling her a grocer's daughter and I thought, hang on, I come from grocer's daughters, these are my people.

5:12So you're proud of suburbia? Please object to what Margaret Thatcher does. And in my opinion, what she did was catastrophic for the country. But don't object to her on class background. And that has really informed me through my whole life. The second thing Bexhill gave me was a love of anything that is not Bexhill. I wake up thrilled if I'm going to a rehearsal. I'm thrilled to visit a film set. The idea that I've been privileged enough to meet the great writers, great actors, great musicians, great artists in my life when I'm a boy from Bexhill, it never loses its excitement for me. So you still have that appreciation of culture, the possibilities of life.

5:55I'm incredibly lucky to have got out of Bexhill. From the way you're describing it, it was a kind of a lower middle class upbringing. We were in a semi-design. You didn't really have much money for 11 months. Oh, no money for the 11 months. It was mince and potatoes. And yet you were educated at a public school at Lansing. Scholarship boy. Right. You know, those are the days of social mobility. I got a scholarship to my prep school. I got a scholarship to my private school. And I got a scholarship to Cambridge eventually. You could do that. You could ascend through the class system. Did you feel like an outsider at school?

6:26I really don't like that word. In other words, everybody claims to be an outsider. You know, I'm sure King Charles claims to be an outsider. I'm sure Tom Cruise claims to be an outsider. It's sort of become such an easy word. But I do think one step back, yes. Did you feel at the time that you were looked down upon by some of the other people? When I turned up at Lansing, you know, I had a slightly off accent. Off. Meaning not plum middle class. Oh, right. And I had to correct that in the first few months. But I also felt probably wrongly that all the other boys understood the codes of that place.

7:04that there was something called the middle class that was absolutely cut from the ribeye of Surrey. And I felt not one of them. Did you feel like you had to assimilate, though? Oh, I was trying desperately to assimilate, but nobody was remotely convinced. The accent works, doesn't it? Yeah, I've changed the accent. Of course I have. And it's stuck to this day, because a lot of people regard you as a middle class person. Of course they do. They don't know anything about my background. But that's why I would never dare to call myself an outsider. How could I? Your 1978 play Plenty, one of your first big successes, which premiered at the National Theatre and then moved to New York and then was later adapted as a film starring Meryl Streep, is about post-war dissatisfaction.

7:48And the protagonist, Susan, served in the special operations executive behind enemy lines during the war. And her life in peacetime is now dull. This work is hell. No doubt. I am living in hell. Why do I lie? We have to get there by midnight. What do I do it for? It's your profession. That's what's wrong. In France... Ah, France. I told such glittering lies. To produce what my masters call good copy, it is simply a question of pitching my intelligence low enough, shutting my eyes and imagining what it's like to be very, very stupid. This is all the future holds for any of us. We will spend the next 20 years of our lives pretending to be thick.

8:32Are the themes of that play that you explore rooted in Bexhill? Completely. In other words, I felt I'd missed the big event. The big event was the Second World War. And unfortunately, I was born after it. So I didn't know why everyone was behaving in the way they were behaving, which seemed to me very odd. But of course, it was a reaction to everything they'd seen and felt. There is that idea that Susan Traherne needs something else in her life because it's been so exciting during the war. whereas the men are quite happy that everything is... Yeah, because they're recovering from what happened.

9:05They're recovering from it. But she can't adjust. What motivated the play was reading a statistic where it said that 75 % of the women who were SOE were divorced within 10 years of the war. And so you thought, oh, I see, you come back and nothing is ever going to be as satisfying again. So it's about an idea of lost utopia, a place where you're challenged. And although it's incredibly dangerous, it's also incredibly fulfilling. And that's a universal theme, I hope, and not just a historic theme.

9:39Your next choice of creative influence is the socialist writer and academic Raymond Williams, who was one of your tutors at Cambridge University where you read English literature. What did you know about Raymond Williams before you went to Cambridge? Well, I've read Culture and Society. The book for which he's best known, isn't it? Yes, and up till that point, I had thought that culture was something completely discreet from society, and literature was something that was nothing to do with what was actually happening in the society at the time. And then you suddenly read this revolutionary book in which Raymond argues in his famous phrase, culture is ordinary.

10:16And he argues that the culture of the time is the expression of what's going on underneath. When I got back from the army in 45 to Cambridge, everybody was using this word culture, which I'd hardly heard them use before. And I wondered what it meant, because I could pick up at least three different senses in which they were using it. There were so many false accounts of the past in that area of what people had enjoyed. I mean, it took years to understand the foignet does the real history of the music hall, as distinct from the official account, a nice boozy, sentimental one, or looking down on it.

10:54The real history is much more complicated, much more interesting, but people wouldn't have thought the music hall was a fit subject for history. It's the expression of social movement that is happening unseen under the surface of society and which is given expression by great writers who penetrate further below the society than the ones who just dance around on the top of it. You know, it's a sort of anti-Bloomsbury, anti-drawing room, anti-elite attitude to culture. So challenging that notion that culture is imposed top down, it's prescribed for the good of society. Exactly. That the great writers are the ones who detect what is going on under the surface.

11:35How did you come across the book? It was in the library at Lansing. But what attracted you to it? Who led you to it? Or did you just stumble across it? I stumbled across it and I thought it was fantastic. And on the flyleaf, it said, Raymond Williams teaches at Jesus College, Cambridge. I'd never heard of Jesus College, Cambridge. But I said to my English teacher, I'd like to go to this place called Jesus College, Cambridge, because I'd like to study with Raymond Williams. And he said, well, sit for the scholarship then. So I sat for the scholarship bank and I got in. The problem was that Raymond was so busy doing other things.

12:09On May the 1st, 1968, he famously was the editor of the May Day Manifesto, which was a recipe for revolution in urban Britain. So, you know, that took him a little time to write. For the first two years, he wouldn't teach us at all. He just refused. That was very, very disillusioning. And it did mean that Cambridge was not, for me, the intellectual glorious place that I had hoped it was going to be. And when I did finally get to be taught by him, he was a great teacher with whom I profoundly disagreed. I remember just not believing in the possibility of working class revolution in Britain. And because Raymond had been a tank commander in the Second World War, I remember saying to him, and who exactly is going to take the post office tower when your revolution comes?

12:55Are you going to be the person driving the tank up Tottenham Court Road to destroy? How exactly is this revolution going to take place? I do not understand it. And for a while, all my instincts were to satirise the left rather than to belong to the left, because I thought their dreams were so ridiculous. I thought they were absurd. Where were these conversations taking place, bearing in mind that you'd gone to Cambridge to study English literature under Raymond Williams? You weren't there to study revolution. Raymond wouldn't talk about literature. I mean, he never talked... We'd usually talk about the Dennis Potter play that had been on telly the night before.

13:32And when I went for a tutorial about D.H. Lawrence, I handed him my long, boring essay on D.H. Lawrence, and Raymond's entire contribution in return to that essay was, yes, D.H. Lawrence, poor bugger, poor bugger. That's all he gave me. He wanted to talk about anything but literature. and because he knew that I was interested in politics and I was interested in theatre and I was interested in ideas, not that he ever went to the theatre, by the way, he taught a course called Ibsen to Brecht, which was the first theatre course at Cambridge, but he never went. He hated it. If you said to him, do you want to come and see my production of such and such, this very, very distant look came into his eye.

14:18He never wanted to go. And he was busy writing these interminable Welsh novels about life in 680 in obscure parts of Wales. I mean, he was a genuine intellectual with whom I did nothing really but quarrel. And he would be amazed to hear me now talking about him in these terms. But I realised he fixed my life without my understanding it at the time. Did you seek him out as a father figure? Yeah, exactly. And by curious coincidence, before he died, Raymond's last words to me, not in reference to me, was, I can't be a father to everyone. I remember Eric Hobsbawm making a very mean joke when he said, it is only in England that the revolution would be led by a literary critic.

15:07And yet it's true, everyone deferred to Raymond because he had incredible moral integrity that the rest of the left did not have in such abundance. Did he know that you had sought him out as a father? No, it was not personal. It wasn't about that. And he'd have been amazed to... And I think I've only realised it years later. What's been the main legacy of Raymond Williams' thoughts, his writing or his lack of teaching on your life and your work? In my life? Yeah. Constantly going back to the street. to try and find out what's happening. So the number of people who come to me and say, will you do Boris Johnson?

15:42Will you do Donald Trump? I say, no, they've already happened. What I'm very good at is writing about things that are about to happen because I've found out what's going on. And so that has involved me in a lot of projects which involve research. The most striking example was Murmuring Judges, which was a play I wrote in the early 90s about the police, the prisons and the legal system. And I spent a week in Clapham police station and police were really angry going around saying Margaret Thatcher has created these huge divisions in society. And our job as police is to go and bandage the wounds that she has created.

16:25And she needs to come to some of the council estates that we go to, to see what the effect of her policies had been. And I went, wow, left wing policemen. But they weren't really left wing. They were more defining their profession as something that was an emergency service to help cure the ills that have been created by politicians. But that revelation challenges the view at the time, which was that the police were on every march. Hopelessly corrupt. Or they were always derided as Maggie's boot boys. Yeah, exactly. So what I'm saying is I saw long before the police, as they are, you know, 30 years later, accused of being overly woke by right wing politicians.

17:08I could see the police were heading that way because of their personal experience of what they saw and the people they saw who had been abandoned. it drives me nuts when people say that my writing is journalistic because unlike journalists, I intend to be ahead of what happens, not behind what happens. I'm reporting on what is going on that no one else has noticed is going on. You have done, though. I mean, with Stuff Happens, the vertical hour, and when you're talking about the Iraq war. No, it's not true. It's not true. With Stuff Happens, the whole play, which is, for those of you who don't know it, which I imagine is most of you, the diplomatic process leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

17:50At that time, the theory which I advance, which is that the American leadership exploited 9-11 in order to do something that had nothing to do with 9-11 and that George Bush took Tony Blair for a complete ride, that was a staggeringly unpopular point of view in 2003. I was way ahead of the curve on that. Now it's the accepted view of history that that's what happened. Going back to the late 60s, what sparked your interest, or how did you get involved in theatre at Cambridge originally? I tried acting and I was really terrible, but I could see that when actors were in trouble I could help them.

18:30And I've always been able to see the clockwork behind acting, and so, you know, therefore the obvious job is director. After university in 1968, you set up the Portable Theatre Company, which travelled around the country taking plays to unusual venues. So you set out on the road as a director but along the route you turned into a playwright. How did that happen? Just real chance. What happened was another playwright failed to deliver a play. We had nothing to rehearse the following Monday and on Wednesday I started writing a one-act play. Only 60 minutes, four days. And the play was rubbish but...

19:07Which play was that? It was a play that is consigned to history called How Brophy Made Good. And it was a satire about the possibility of revolution in England, my old bugbear. I just saw when I handed the scripts out that the actors looked at the page and they went, oh, OK, I can say that. He can write dialogue. And it took a long term to learn to write plays, but I could write dialogue. What made you so politically engaged at the time, do you think? Well, 1968. Right. I mean, what are you meant to say? Student riots, political assassinations. Look, also, I had travelled through the Southampton, South of America.

19:42At the age of 17, I'd gone on a tour. I'd gone into cities that had been burning the night before. I had seen the civil rights movement at first hand. I'd met Clifford and Virginia Derr, who were responsible for bringing the Rosa Parks case. So I'd seen the best of American radicalism. I'd also remember I'd seen the best of British radicalism, which I would take to be Raymond Williams. But how would you describe your politics at the time? Satirical. Not revolutionary? No. Because you couldn't take that seriously because you thought it was just simply not going to happen? I wasn't a Marxist. I believed in the power of individuals to change history.

20:19Did you think that theatre could play a part in affecting political change? God knows what I thought. I thought that going out on the road, which was largely inspired by my friend Tony Beekar, it was his vision more than mine. The only way you would change the audience was by changing the places where you played. It was as simple as that. So if the British theatre was oppressed by a middle-class audience, the only way you could change it is go to the place where people live. So it wasn't what you played, it's where you played it. Where you played it and what you gave, which was shocking and disruptive and was really intended to say, have you noticed that capitalism is about to crash?

20:57Now, in that, we were entirely wrong. It was agitational theatre. There's a wonderful saying of Howard Brenton's where he says, agit is a lot easier than prop. meaning it's very easy to say what's wrong. It's very difficult to say what's right. Did you get the bug? Did you feel you could do it as soon as you'd written that one, Brophy? Totally. And remember, the first play I wrote, which was Slag, the first full-length play, was produced by the leading producer in the West End, Michael Codron, at that point. And so I was living this strange, divided life where I was simultaneously on the wildest extremes of the fringe change and a mainstream commercial producer was saying here's the next big commercial playwright in your memoir which you wrote about 10 years ago you said that you made two rules early in your playwriting career that you would never write a play if you had nothing to say and you would never write for money have you stuck to those yeah do you think why was that so important because the world's full of bad plays and bad films it doesn't need any more i'm a writer who has to believe in what they're doing.

22:06And if I don't believe, and I turn down a certain number of films and theatre projects on the grounds, you really don't want me because I will do this very badly, because my heart will not be in it. I can only make it work if I'm completely committed to the idea that I am writing the most important film or play of its time. You may say I'm pathetically delusional, but that is what has sustained me for so long. But what determines whether a subject is worthy of a David Hare play. Well, that to me is as mysterious as what determines for a painter, what do they paint? There is no answer to that question.

22:42Your imagination just fires. When I did the play about the privatisation of the railways, I spent a week in workshop with Max Stafford-Clark, who loves railways. And so he was in bliss. I was going, I don't think there's any story here, Max. There's just a lot of train crashes. What the hell is this about? I don't need an evening for railway fanatics. It's just not me. and then I started talking to the bereaved, people who had lost relatives, as opposed to people who had survived and they could not agree on anything. They could not agree how to have a celebration on Paddington station because the survivors wanted a celebration whereas the bereaved wanted a denouncing of the railway company and once I saw that huge difference between bereavement and surviving.

23:28I had a universal theme that was metaphorical and was nothing to do with train crashes and nothing to do with who owns the railways, but was about that great theme of necessary and unnecessary suffering. How do we limit the amount of suffering that we do and praise to anyone who through social and political work can mitigate the suffering so that life is not so miserable on earth while we're here. And that play, The Permanent Way, that was sort of borne out of the headlines about the Potters Bar crash and the Laput Grove crash and those other disasters on the railways. But over the course of the career, you have written many plays based on real events and real people, whether that is the Iraq War or whether it's Gaza and the judiciary and the church and all of those institutions.

24:19What does a play do for our understanding of real-life events that investigative journalism can't do? It has to have a metaphorical dimension. So with The Permanent Way, a New York friend of mine came out of the performance in floods of tears and I very facetiously and stupidly said to him, oh, I didn't realise you cared so much about the railway system. To which he replied, I didn't. I saw the whole thing as being about AIDS, about why did people not move to prevent these unnecessary things happening? why did the government do so little to help people who could be helped. So he'd seen it entirely about the friends of his that he'd lost through AIDS.

25:02And as a playwright, that is a very welcome reading for you. That to me is the whole point of doing what I'm doing, for it to resonate in different ways in people's minds. I think what's so striking is that so many of your plays set up competing viewpoints and you've always claimed you don't want to tell the audience what to think. So what effect do you want primarily your plays to have on an audience? Well, you know, I saw the Roald Dahl play, Giant, and the first act of that play, my wife and I came out, and it's a play about Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism. For 15 minutes, we discussed the play, not the acting, not the production, just the themes of.

25:45It was so stimulating, that play, that you came out, And I said to my wife afterwards, how long is it since we actually spent 15 minutes talking about what we have just seen? Because usually you just hear people say, are you going skiing this year or whatever? And that to me is a live play. It's a play that makes you rethink what you believe and what you know and turns the soil over so that you think and feel afresh. And that to me is very, very exciting. And I think theatre does it much better than other art forms. Your plays have divided the critics over the years, haven't they? Yeah. And you've been labelled the classic champagne socialist playwright.

26:27How thick-skinned are you? Do you have to be thick-skinned to be a political playwright? I think I realised very early that the things you needed to be a playwright were theatres to put your work on, you needed audiences, you needed critics to get the audiences in, and you needed great actors. Of the four, I rapidly discovered the critics were the least important, meaning that people began to attend my plays in spite of the critics, and they found their own audiences. You know, it happened to me recently with a play called I'm Not Running, which was at the National Theatre. When we went to the PR office to try and find a good review to put on the poster, we could not find a single phrase from a critic in praise of the play.