'Theatre is where society goes to look at itself,' says David Hare, whose work tries to untangle truth from lies, writes Helen Meany
'Will you tell me, will you tell me please, what exactly are you doing here?" It's a question that will always be posed in some form in a work by the British playwright and screenwriter, David Hare, but in Skylight, which opens next week at Project, in Dublin, it is particularly pointed. Written in 1995, the play explores the conflict of values between Tom, a wealthy restaurateur, and his ex-lover, Kyra, who now teaches in a disadvantaged, inner-city school in London and is committed to improving her pupils' prospects.
When Tom calls unexpectedly to her cramped flat on a winter's night, he struggles to make sense of her new life. An intense dialogue between them ranges over their past, re-ignites their passion and suggests the possibility of a shared future.
While it is a love story, the interest is not only psychological and emotional. Typically, for a play by Hare, Kyra and Tom's heated exchanges reflect the broader social and political landscape, and yet the characters are not mere mouthpieces for a political position.
In Dublin last weekend to observe Kathy Belton, Michael FitzGerald and Owen Roe in rehearsal, under Michael Caven's direction, Hare is curious to see how the play will be received in Dublin, where his work is rarely staged. Nearly a decade since it was written, it remains current, he believes, and is not tied to a specifically English context.
"The argument between people who want to sacrifice themselves and those who choose to believe in the entrepreneurial culture hasn't gone away. Kyra is one of those people whose work is undervalued. She is clearing up the mess made by Thatcherism, trying to bandage society's wounds."
Her character has a lot in common with the clergymen in Racing Demons, the first play in Hare's ambitious "state of the nation" trilogy from the early 1990s, staged at London's National Theatre by its artistic director at the time, Richard Eyre. Examining, in turn, the Church of England, the judiciary (Murmuring Judges) and the Labour Party (The Absence of War), these plays were fuelled by Hare's sense that the institutions of the state had abdicated their social responsibilities, and retreated behind a fog of shibboleths - or outright lies. Racing Demons depicts a group of vicars who have effectively become social workers, and questions whether morality has anything to do with spirituality.
Emerging from public school and Cambridge in the late 1960s with a highly critical view of institutional power, Hare joined forces with Howard Brenton (with whom he later wrote Pravda) in the precarious world of Fringe theatre.
Since then, decades of plays for stage and television, as well as adaptations (Brecht and early Chekhov) and screenplays, (Wetherby, Plenty, Paris By Night, Strapless, Damage, and the recent film of Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours) have established him as one of the most prolific and versatile of contemporary British writers. His plays have ranged from the historical sweep of Plenty, which follows its main character from the second World War to the early 1960s, to an intimate drama about grief and faith such as The Secret Rapture, which is currently being revived in London. ("Nobody's going to it," Hare says, ruefully.)
While his chosen forms are unpredictable, his political engagement remains consistent, as does his advocacy of the importance of theatre as a forum for public debate.
"While younger playwrights might be shying away from taking on political themes - here in Ireland too, I think - I believe it's still possible for a work of art to have a huge social impact, and that's fantastically important. Theatre makes that possible: it's more public than the novel or poetry. Theatre is where society goes to look at itself. When people think together they think more deeply."
As a screenwriter Hare is attracted to the work of American novelists and is currently wrestling with an adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's mammoth novel, The Corrections, which will be directed by Stephen Daldry and produced by Scott Rudin, the team that created The Hours. "I love the idea of being able to make these subversive films: The Hours is an anti-family film aimed at Bush's America. Rudin is a unique figure in Hollywood, a highly intelligent and cultivated person who seems to be able to do what he wants. So with The Hours, we were able to make a film about suicidal lesbians!
"Jonathan Franzen is a highly politicised novelist, whose impulse to write came from the insanity of the Gulf War. I'm attracted by the magisterial sweep of American writers like him and Philip Roth. What's happening in the novel in America is what my generation of playwrights is doing on the British stage: working on a large social canvas. Whereas the contemporary English novel is of no interest to people like me - it seems to have turned its back on the world."
Hare's recent stage work is moving towards more direct engagement with the audience, diminishing authorial interpretation. In Via Dolorosa (1998), he stepped under the spotlight himself, to deliver a monologue that presented the multiple perspectives of Palestinians and Israeli settlers on the West Bank. It was a form of reportage, into which his own opinions did not intrude in an explicit way.
"Curiosity is much more valuable than opinion. I didn't want to interpose myself between the people I had talked to in the Middle East and the audience. And I couldn't invent anything, or have English actors playing Palestinians or Israelis. I presented it all as testimony and let people form their own conclusions."
Similarly, his latest play, The Permanent Way, takes the form of a collage of voices addressing the politically sensitive subject of the privatisation of the railways in Britain and the four subsequent train crashes. Based on interviews with railway employees, managers, civil servants, police, crash survivors and the bereaved, it presents all of these groups' experiences in their own words, with the performers frequently addressing the audience directly.
Having toured in November and December, it has just opened at the Royal National Theatre in London, in a fluidly staged, highly choreographed Out of Joint production, directed by Max Stafford-Clark and brilliantly designed by William Dudley.
"We met such extraordinary people in the course of our research," says Hare."I let their anger speak for itself. I didn't feel any need to editorialise. I was worried the subject might be too academic but I have been overwhelmed by the passion of people's response to it. The tour has been a classic instance of theatre functioning as it should. You could feel the audience engaging with the material. Many of them were railworkers who hadn't been to the theatre before: it's a hugely popular cause.
"It's a story about people trying to find out the truth, being baulked in their attempt and becoming angry. There's a lot of anger in Britain now and a sense of powerlessness, a sense people have that 'nothing I do or say could influence what happens'. That emerged over the Iraq war: two million people marched to oppose it and there was no attempt made by politicians even to engage with the argument."
Untangling truth and lies, exposing the gap between words and actions, working out what values we can live by, or what goodness is - these impulses remain at the heart of Hare's work, after more than 30 years. He writes to the moment, not thinking "too much" about his work's longevity, or about posterity. Not too much, perhaps, but enough to say: "If Plenty doesn't last, I've wasted my life."