Oh the glamour of British cultural life. It’s a chilly winter’s day in Hertfordshire, with heavy clouds and the constant threat of rain, and David Hare and I are sitting in a small caravan, grandly called a trailer, while he talks about the moment he chose to turn his back on Hollywood.
It was in the late Eighties, when he had written the films Wetherby, Strapless and Paris by Night. At the same time, he had proposed a play about the Church of England to Richard Eyre, then director of the National Theatre – a suggestion that evolved into a trilogy of plays about British life.
“I reached a fork in the road, when I had to choose whether to stay in the theatre, or go into the cinema, where I was in great demand as a screenwriter. And I chose the theatre, really because of Richard’s wonderful offer. So that was the turning point in my life, and I have never, ever regretted it.”
Not that he gave up the screen completely. He has twice been nominated for Oscars (for The Hours and The Reader) and the reason for the barely heated trailer is that he is currently directing a thoughtful thriller about M15, his first original screenplay for 20 years, starring Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon, which he has written for the BBC.
But theatre was, and is, the mainstay of his career, the place he has won most acclaim – and prompted the most controversy. It is theatre we are here to talk about, since tonight Sheffield Theatres launch a month-long season of Hare’s work.
The celebration arose because Sheffield’s new artistic director, Daniel Evans, regards Hare as one of the most significant figures in post-war theatre and has chosen to mount three plays in three theatres more or less simultaneously: Plenty, a study of post-war disillusion directed by Thea Sharrock and starring Hattie Morahan; Racing Demon, the first part of the famous trilogy, which Evans himself will direct; and Breath of Life, which stars Isla Blair and Patricia Hodge.
Hare attempts diffidence – “well, it’s a big event in my life. But it remains to be seen whether it will be a big event in anybody else’s” – but his broad smile reveals his delight. “The directors credit me with all sorts of intentions that I don’t remember having,” he says, with a laugh. “It’s going to be a revelation to me what these plays are.”
The pleasure is particularly intense because when Hare was a young man with a different sort of van, taking his deliberately provocative political theatre out on the road, Sheffield was “well known as being one of the best places to play”.
But it also affords an opportunity for him to assess his impact on British theatre. “It says on the literature that I am one of the most influential post-war playwrights. I would have billed myself as one of the least influential in the sense that I don’t think anyone else wants to do what I wanted to do. When I go to see a film like The Social Network, then I feel a kinship, I feel they are doing exactly what I am trying to do, which is to make a modern myth out of quasi documentary theatre. But in the theatre, I feel incredibly lonely.”
This seems extraordinary, particularly when playwrights such as Polly Stenham and Lucy Prebble seem to be attempting to do very much what Hare has always done – to make modern Britain look at its image in a mirror.
But he is having none of it. “I think this crop of writers is incredibly talented, the most exciting generation of writers since I went into the theatre. I get incredibly cheerful when I go to see their work. But I don’t feel any influence.”
Although Hare says that he “feels no kinship at all” with agitprop theatre, he acknowledges that his motivation for choosing theatre after he left Cambridge in the late Sixties, when film was “the passion of my generation”, was politically motivated: “We wanted to start a touring theatre, to go around the country and cause political trouble. But then I got more and more fascinated by how to do it better. And so my life went off in that direction without my really meaning it.”
His plays have subsequently fallen into three broad categories: those such as Plenty, which reveal their opinions through private psychodramas; those including Racing Demon, which are based on extensive research but transform fact into engrossing stories; and those such as Stuff Happens, and The Power of Yes (about the banking crisis), which are documentary in form.
Hare says that the private dramas nearly always spring from a visual image. “With Plenty, it was the opening of a woman rolling a cigarette in front of a high window with a naked man on the floor.” The documentary dramas, on the other hand, require him to find a point of contact that transforms the specific into something more universal. “I am never comfortable until I can understand a way of it being more than the subject matter.”
With The Permanent Way, it was the director Max Stafford Clark who was obsessed with the state of the railways. Hare jibbed, but then he met a woman who could not identify her son after his death in the Paddington rail crash. “Then I began to see how it could be about something more universal, about the line between necessary suffering and unnecessary suffering.” Stuff Happens was both savagely acute about the origins of the Iraq war and a study of the misuse of power. But The Power of Yes was written to demand. “I did become what I call the short order chef,” says Hare, with a swift laugh, meaning he had a reputation for writing plays to order. “The financial crisis was one I did with the utmost reluctance and I did it because my arm was twisted halfway up my back.”
The arm-twister was Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre. “And I said to him, I notice you don’t go to Alan Bennett and ask him to write a play about the financial crisis because you know bloody well he would say no. So you only come to me to write that because I have a reputation for saying yes.”
Later, he adds: “I think it is important to say that I feel an incredible loyalty to the National Theatre – they have given me everything – so it is absolutely impossible for me to refuse Nick when he looks me in the eye and says we need this.”
Hare’s openness to the world around him – “I feel there is so much to write about in this century that I can’t get it down fast enough” – makes him feel bleak when he surveys the political landscape. I ask him whether what Richard Eyre described as his romantic belief in the possibility of change has taken a battering. There is an incredibly long pause before he says: “It makes my friends angry when I say this, but always having been a social democrat and not a revolutionary, it was undoubtedly the social democrats who failed in the first 10 years of the 21st century. It is our fault.
“And I do feel that some of the profound flaws in social democracy are being now worked out: it seems powerless to exert any control over global capitalism. In 2007/8 we had a group of bankers running the country. We had a crash, for which they were not, as everyone says, partly responsible, but for which they were entirely responsible, and now they are back in charge again and everything is as if it never happened.
“And so I feel it is a profound question to ask how does social democracy now exert control over wild free-market fundamentalism?”
It is a question he feels the Coalition government is “uniquely ill-equipped to answer. I have never seen an intellectually shallower government.”
However disillusioned he may be with politics, however angry at cuts that hit the poor and threaten the arts, Hare is also these days a man who has found personal happiness with his marriage to the fashion designer Nicole Farhi. Not that this has changed his plays.
“Nicole slightly resents the fact that I feel this,” he says, smiling. “But I can’t see any connection between personal contentment and work. Some of the work I have produced since I have been with her has been more miserable than when I was miserable.”
Two years ago, Farhi was robbed at knifepoint. Hare, cerebral as he might appear, instantly gave chase to the robbers. “I was surprised by myself that I ran down the street after these people,” he says.
It reminded him of a conversation he had with Stephen Daldry when they were making The Reader and discussing whether they would have been brave enough to stand up to the Nazis. “I said I wouldn’t have spoken out, but Stephen said 'You don’t know yourself at all. You would have been killed in the first six months.’ ”
The David Hare Season runs at Sheffield Theatres from now until March 5. Details 0114 249 6000 sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
