Hare raising ideas ... David Hare
Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty
People think a lot of things about David Hare. Quite a few think he's the most important English playwright since the sixties. Another group, roughly equal in number, think he's a bit of a shrill bore. This group is more multifaceted, and includes those on the right who dismiss his work as liberal carping, and those on the hard left for whom he's a Hampstead pinko who says "Golly" a lot. The truth is a bit more complicated, but an hour watching David Hare answering questions about his career leaves the impression that most people who think things about David Hare probably have a point.
The event, on May 27, was part of the Brighton Festival, and coincided with the launch of Obedience, Struggle and Revolt, a collection of Hare's lectures from the past two decades. Discussing the book with the academic Stephen Phillips, Hare began with the observation that a life in the theatre means "not just performing, but performing and being judged", a fact felt even more acutely by those who work in political theatre. Two recent plays, The Permanent Way and Stuff Happens, have seen Hare venturing into some very public controversies, and the conversation that followed centred on a question he has faced at numerous points in his career: how do you turn unstable political events into engaging theatre?
Describing the writing of Stuff Happens, a blend of documentary and imagined dialogue surrounding the invasion of Iraq, Hare explained a shift in his own attitude which occurred during the process of rewriting the play for Broadway.
The figure of Colin Powell, originally a "a liberal hero" caught between his own conscience and the hawkish momentum of the US administration, had gradually become a "tragic hero", who shared Tony Blair's "tragic delusion" of believing he could bridle military momentum in the United States. Hare's own conclusion is that the lack of WMD, like the failure of Guantánamo Bay, wasn't an aberration, but was actually the point - the invasion was an exhibition of power, America invaded Iraq "because it could".
A similar urge "to find out what had happened, and make someone acknowledge what had happened", inspired The Permanent Way, Hare's account of the privatisation of Britain's railways. He confessed to feeling overwhelmed by the mass of available information on the subject, until an interview with the mother of a rail crash victim gave the whole project a sudden human urgency.
The subject of the play that resulted wasn't the railways but "grief as a process", an interpretation which was reinforced when a New York friend asked Hare why he hadn't warned him that he had written a play about Aids. For Hare, this appears to be the essence of political theatre; as he put it, "I'm not turned on by ideas, even though people think I am. It's metaphors that excite me."
Alongside these insights, however, ran another current which at times threatened to overwhelm Hare's arguments. You expect a bit of conceitedness from writers, but the repeated insistence that Stuff Happens is "a Shakespearean play" (three times), and Hare's claims that he single-handedly revived the career of John Osborne and inaugurated the reassessment of the Second World War in English writing were a bit much to take, and left the impression that given half a chance Hare would boast about having single-handedly eaten his own breakfast.
There is also a contrast between the nuanced intelligence of the plays and a tendency towards overstatement and simplification in the man himself, whether on newspapers ("any newspaper that uses the stars review system hates art") or the "ossified" state of radio current affairs. Hare is a deft articulator of his opinions, but their value lessens with each simplification. The new book will certainly make its readers think, but for Hare's real contribution I reckon they'd be better off going back to the plays.
