A gaze that sees plays of things to come
Sir David Hare: Enchanted by Galle’s magic and the cricket ground
The sea sparkles a diamond blue around Jetwing Lighthouse Hotel’s breezy lobby. Seated, Sir David Hare’s eyes are fixed on the horizon- he alone seems to see something hazy brewing there. It is a lifetime’s habit for one of Britain’s leading playwrights: To see what has not yet happened- the dormant just a smudge out there- yet to mushroom.
Hare wants to be the first person to take up any social issue in a play. Absence of War, a play about the loss of conviction in left wing politics, was written in 1993. Paris did it only two weeks ago- followed by flashing headlines “the play of the year” and the “most important contemporary play”. He admits he has the gift “for being ahead of what’s happening- rather than transcribing what is happening as it happens.”
Here for the recently concluded Fairway Galle Literary Festival, Sir David Hare is also a screenwriter and film and theatre director. He is ardently in love with Galle’s magic, and enchanted by the cricket ground in the shadow of the fort as much as by the sea.
With such preferences he is reassuringly British- so much so that people have found it odd that “a hetero, cricket-loving product of public school” is a social commentator and critic of the establishment. But for Hare this is “just a way of not looking at what one’s work is actually saying”- a crisis in modern journalism where the focus is on the personality of the artist- rather than the artwork itself. Serious pieces which concentrate on the artwork, he says, are getting astonishingly rare.
David Hare was always an acute observer, growing up in the tedium of the lower- middle class suburbia where all a gifted boy could do was notice things and hole into imagination. And then, as a public schoolboy and talented writer, he was always being “forced up through the class system”, so he always had the peculiar feeling of “being in it, but also not in it”- the perfect vantage point to examine society.
It was the exhilaratingly heady European cinema of the 50s through to the 70s that attracted him first as a creative outlet: Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle and Michelangelo Antonioni. But Britain’s own cinema being impoverished at the time, he went for stage- though on his own terms.
With friend Tony Bicât in 1968 he formed the Portable Theatre Group- which went for unconventional venues- prisons, halls, army camps; anywhere away from regular theatres and usual audiences. They were quite rebellious, following such radicals as John Osborne, Edward Bond and Joan Littlewood. What sparkled and danced within Hare was the desire to make Britons see their own hypocrisies and stupidities.
“The British empire had come to an end in the last 15 years. And yet the British were behaving as if they ruled the world. This seemed to us ridiculous and we wanted to satirize those pretensions.”
But his first written play, Slag (1971) was about three teachers who mutually pledge to avoid sex in protest of male dominance. Despite this ridicule of feminism, Hare, in all his oeuvre, has spoken ardently on behalf of women. Very early he started to point out that women’s lives were very interesting to portray, and that they should be given equality onstage and off.
Hare says women “have a lot to be angry about”. He had seen, as a boy, the life of his mother being wasted despite her intelligence and talents, while his father cheated on her and was away from home as a sailor. He consequently values, admires and sees the importance of strong women- like his good friend Germaine Greer.
With half a century in theatre Hare has changed through the decades. Coming out of the sixties, his generation was apocalyptic and foresaw a violent death for capitalism- which never came about. Those days his satires were rather callous- but now he has become more mellow and sympathetic- especially to those who “bandage the wounds and do triage on those who have been hurt by society”. “Social workers, teachers, doctors, priests- these kind of public servants have become my heroes and heroines.”
One of Hare’s regrets is that he passed up the chance to be a film director, though he is rather good at it, as such films as the Worricker Trilogy (2011) and Collateral (2018) manifest. He had always wanted to do something really popular- just as some of his favourite authors- Graham Greene and John le Carré- managed to be both popular and serious.
Hare’s work through the years are a richly comprehensive portrait of contemporary Britain and its institutions. He has also written plays set in China, India, America and the crisis in Israel and the Palestinian territory.
Through the years, his best known works remains the British “State of the Nation” trilogy: Racing Demon (1990) on the Church of England, Murmuring Judges (1991) on the legal system and The Absence of War (1993) on the Labour Party. His latest play ‘I’m Not Running’ is also on the Labour Party.
All his works were not overnight successes. The plays with worst first night reviews later became great favourites. Plenty, the Absence of War and The Judas Kiss- a play on Oscar Wilde- opened to bad reviews. Hare has lived through many reclamations and re-establishments of plays previously looked down on.
This is because people are always shocked by the new. “If you are not shocked, or slightly taken aback or disoriented, it is a sign that it is not new.”
Hare’s advice for young playwrights is to “put your play on”. If producers won’t accept the play “put it on yourself”- because “you’ll never learn anything about playwrighting unless you see your own work performed.”
“The danger of satire,” he says, “is always if you take yourself too seriously- we have to laugh at us as much as at those we are satirizing.”
Hare, master of both cinema and stage, also says that there is no consistency when it comes to the screen- unlike in theatre. Hitchcock and Spielberg, he points out, made some splendid films as well as terrible ones- but a playwright like Brian Friel manages to produce one good play after the other.
Why? Film he says is a mix of spontaneity and control. It is so volatile and unpredictable that, if you try to control every element of it, your work becomes “deader and deader”: the mistake, and unmaking, of the great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
In Hare’s work, the rebel and the romantic within him are forever battling or blending. Yet it is touching that over all these years, his romantic optimism has in no way diminished. While, with the rest of the world, he may be disillusioned with the ruling class, he still draws enormous strength from the beauty of simple resilience, faith, love, courage and hope in ordinary people- even as they fight all their daunting daily battles.
Conversations with Sir David Hare, and Mohammed Hanif, two of the big names
at the recently concluded FGLF