Abstract
Playwright
“I go to an awful lot of plays where I am told that racism is a bad thing or sexism is a bad thing or that gender is fluid or that gay people are as entitled to love as heterosexual people… Platitudes of the day are rehearsed and we leave the theatre and we feel confirmed,” the award-winning playwright told Index.
Hare, who wrote the plays Skylight and Plenty, believes this “herd-mindedness” is distinctly new to the 21st century. Twentieth-century playwrights, by contrast, “saw themselves as rebels against common wisdom rather than just confirming the common wisdom”.
“The playwright, in my view, has always been the person who is out ahead of public pace and so the great plays of the 20th century – which would include Waiting for Godot or Look Back in Anger – are outstandingly ugly and almost incomprehensible when they first appear. People go, ‘Oh my goodness, what is this? I don’t know what this is’.”
The desire to avoid offence doesn’t extend just to plays. It concerns the personal profile of playwrights too, he argues.
“In the current atmosphere, someone like Strindberg is completely unperformable because the consensus is he’s a misogynist… You reach the point where you say, ‘Is there absolutely nothing that Strindberg can tell us at all?’.”
It’s a pertinent question, especially for someone such as Hare. While his career has seen his name on screenplays including Oscar-winning film The Hours, the bread- and-butter of his writing has been plays that poke fun at the British political establishment.
Hare willingly admits he’s spent his “whole life giving offence” and says it’s a basic right that he defends very strongly.
He believes you cannot be a writer “and not be 100% in favour of free speech”.
Hare senses he is not alone in being frustrated by the current creative output. He references the popular US television series Succession which satirises the upper echelons of New York society. He says people “fall on it with gratitude precisely because it doesn’t express the common view of what’s going on but treats these people as intrinsically ridiculous”.
Hare is also “driven absolutely mad” by the idea that a writer’s literary influence comes from the writings of others. For Hare “it’s to do with the life you’ve lived and what you see around you and the world.”
It was with this thought in mind that he penned the poem Influence, which is published here for the first time.
Hare, who has been writing poetry for about six years, describes himself as “a nervous poet”, an amateur of sorts – something which can, on a level, act as a strength.
“I’m working as a poet completely outside knowledge of what is going on in the world of poetry and that gives me a wonderful freedom actually to know absolutely nothing about the state of contemporary poetry,” he said. And what if people cite him as an influence?
Award-winning playwright David Hare in Allen Ginsberg’s study
CREDIT: Bronwen Sharp
“If I give people fortitude or comfort or if, by what I do or say, I give them the courage to do what they want to do and to say, then I’m terribly proud of that and any writer who says to me ‘It’s your example I admire’, great,” he said.
“But when they start saying ‘I’m trying to do what you do’, then I do get extremely jumpy and, by and large, I don’t think that the plays that are ‘influenced’ by me are very good.”
Hare’s outspoken attitude has prompted criticism over the years. The journalist Bernard Levin once wrote that he wished “David Hare would go away”. It’s with the BBC, though, that Hare has had the most problems when it comes to free speech.
It was “the most censorious organisation that I have had to work with”, he said, “particularly in the 1970s when it was just run by a particular kind of patrician who interfered all the time with what dramas were saying”.
It’s a damning statement from a man whose play Fanshen, about communism in China, was subjected to more than 110 requests for changes to the text. But Hare believes that kind of very crude political censorship is not how the BBC works anymore, and actually singles out the organisation for praise.
“It’s one of the few hosts to all differing points of view, far more than any of the newspapers that criticise the BBC all the time – the BBC actually welcomes all points of view and that’s why it is the single most important element in the contract of free speech in Great Britain,” he said.
The BBC’s free speech record might be on the up, the government’s less so.
A few days before speaking to Index, Hare had been interviewed by BBC Radio 4 about the government’s handling of the coronavirus.
Hare, who had been ill with the virus himself, chastised the government for not being truthful to the population.
He tells Index that the first film he ever made, Licking Hitler, was about a British propaganda unit during World War II.
“This is very, very dirty stuff,” he said, explaining that public units which lie have always been part of government apparatus, before going on to say that “it feels as if that unit is now running the government”.
Hare, born in 1947, believes people in the UK are “being as badly governed as at any stage in my lifetime”.
He does not see the government as having the same authoritarian tendencies as seen in countries such as Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – the latter of which he describes as a “lying machine” – but asks why, in a social democracy, truth would “not be your best friend”?.
That question of truth has been central to much of Hare’s writing. Take the screenplay Denial, about the trial of Deborah Lipstadt brought by Holocaust-denier David Irving.
“Denial is about something which is so unbelievably important. You know – how do we now fight the counter-myth that is growing, particularly now that, obviously, the generation who grew up who experienced the camps are dying?
“How does the truth defend itself and how does the truth fight?”
Influence
by DAVID HARE
FOR G.B.
“Who are your influences?” the interviewer asks, as though There were the foggiest chance that I might know.
I long ago mastered the rudiments of the game But surely no two players then play the same?
Drop-shot, lob, forehand, backhand, second service, smash,
Patrol the base-line, define your territory before you do anything rash The rhythms of control become unconscious after a while
Yes, you can learn technique, but how can anyone teach you style?
“Surely you admire someone special?” the interviewer says But no good player expects to play exactly how Federer plays. They can’t. Of course I like Chekhov, Ibsen, O’Casey, O’Neill. They’re great. But, sorry, it’s a given, I can’t feel how they feel.
Nor would I wish to. I don’t work in their slipstream. It’s clear A playwright can’t hear dialogue with a borrowed ear
The purpose is not to emulate another woman or man The purpose is to write as well as you possibly can.
And only you. That’s the point. Why else would I bother To write my play if I meant its fate to be to echo another? Feeling desperate, feeling hopeless, I can only repeat “What are your influences?” “People, history, the street.”