David Hare: ‘I am sick to death of hearing about the need for strong women as protagonists’

As Collateral, his first TV series, hits our screens, the writer, 70, talks about artistic freedom — and the horror of ageing

Dominic Maxwell

February 2 2018, 12:01am, The Times


What has compelled David Hare to finally write his first television serial at the age of 70? The answer, he says, is what has always compelled him throughout his almost 50-year career as a playwright and screenwriter: the desire to get to an idea first. “What I’ve always wanted,” he says, “is to be ahead of the curve. For people to say, ‘That is on the nail, that is exactly what my life is like now.’ ”

Collateral, his new four-part thriller for BBC Two, doesn’t sound exceptional in outline. Carey Mulligan plays a detective investigating the murder of a pizza delivery man. Billie Piper plays the drug-addled mum he was delivering to; John Simm plays her ex, a Labour MP; Nicola Walker plays his ex, a vicar in a relationship with an illegal immigrant.

Just another moody police procedural uncovering the rottenness of modern Britain? Yet the reason Hare was able to get such a starry cast, he says, is precisely because he is covering new ground.

The pizza man, we find out, was another illegal immigrant. When Mulligan’s character opens up a garage door to find a family of Syrians, this becomes a different kind of drama. It’s a twisty thriller in form, but what motivated Hare to write it was closer to his usual “state-of-the-nation” dramas. He wanted to look at the “second Britain” of those living and working under the radar.

So don’t ask him to tackle the issues that everyone is already talking about. “What is boring is people asking me to write about Brexit or Donald Trump, neither of which I have any interest in writing about because if I start writing about them I am behind the curve. What I always hope is to be ahead.”

In the early 1990s, when he wrote his trilogy of plays about the church, the judiciary and politics for the National Theatre, he undertook extensive personal research. For Collateral he had a different tactic. He used his imagination. “I am sick to death of research,” Hare says.

This approach is a response, in part, to the past couple of films he wrote: Denial, starring Rachel Weisz, about David Irving and Holocaust denial, and The White Crow, a forthcoming film about Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West, directed by Ralph Fiennes. Hare felt the obligation to historical figures to make a true story truthful. He did his reading, spoke to people involved and went to the ballet.

This time, by contrast, “it was just liberating to make it up”. Only once he had written it did he check his assertions. He went to the sort of removal centre — holding centres for foreign nationals awaiting deportation or a ruling on their asylum claims — that Collateral arrives at in its second episode. Then he spoke to a slew of advisers.

“But by and large if you use your imagination it’s amazing how few mistakes you make,” he says. “I have spoken to various people who have lived here illegally, and you can survive an incredibly long time without paperwork in this country.”

Mulligan pitched in too. Hare’s favourite bit of the first episode is the garage scene, which was rewritten after the actress talked to police and a hostage negotiator and decided the script could be better. “She is a terrier on detail,” Hare says with pride. Decades before #MeToo, Hare was writing leading roles for women in plays such as Plenty (1978), The Secret Rapture (1988) and Amy’s View (1997). His 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles had Helen Mirren fronting a rock band on the stage of the Royal Court in London.

Even so, was it important to give Collateral a female protagonist after focusing on a male MI5 agent, played by Bill Nighy, in his Worricker trilogy for the BBC? No, Hare says, that was less important than making sure there were women in key roles throughout. And although Mulligan’s character is pregnant — as was the actress when she filmed it — there is barely any mention of that in the show. “I am sick to death of hearing about the need for strong women as protagonists. It’s a boring cause. What’s a much more important cause is to show women doing jobs equally, as the normality of the thing. Throughout the cast list.”

Hare can come across as touchy in interviews, but today, over a pot of tea in a hotel bar, he’s a relaxed, smiling presence even as he dishes out his pointed pointers and cheerful heresies with daunting fluency. Why are strong female protagonists a boring cause? He answers without drawing breath.

“It’s very limiting to say you only want to see strong women. I have claimed, because I have written so many women, that I have the right to represent all kinds of women. If I want to represent a murderess, I want that right. Without being called misogynistic. Similarly I want to be free to portray silly women and weak women and clever women; I want to be able to portray all women. When we can portray all women equally, that will be equality. Having just women who storm through the film or play being rude to everyone, and that’s called ‘strong women’, that’s not my idea of equality.

“Women should not be presented as the moral conscience of men’s actions either. I hope I have 100 per cent avoided portraying girlfriends saying to men, ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, darling?’ ”

Hare was brought up primarily by his mother in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, while his father, a purser, was at sea. He concedes that being “surrounded by women all my life” might be a factor in being more likely than many a male playwright to create substantial female roles. He and his first wife, the film and television producer Margaret Matheson (he is now married to the fashion designer turned sculptor Nicole Farhi), had three children: Joe, Lewis and Darcy. “I now have six granddaughters and one grandson, so it seems like fate, doesn’t it?” He beams.

Hare has written plenty of films, including Damage, The Hours and The Reader. For Collateral, though, he had to learn some of the rules of episodic television, even if only to know which of them he could break. He feels he understands why television drama can take us by surprise in a way that is harder to pull off in film. “Audiences are very sophisticated. They can foresee that, in the tenth reel, the hero will meet an insuperable problem and in the eleventh reel the hero will overcome an insuperable problem. And that is a real problem with feature films now. The audience knows what the formula is.

“Whereas the huge popularity of episodic television is its shapelessness. So to take Breaking Bad, an obvious example, you may have one episode that has only two or three people in it. And entirely concentrates on the psychological relationship between those people. And in the next one you have suddenly got car crashes and people being shot, huge numbers of people. You don’t know which way it is going. That’s what people love.”

Will there be more Hare on television? He worked in America on an adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity. Reports last year suggested that it had been delayed until after its star, Daniel Craig, makes his next Bond film, which is due out at the end of 2019. Hare, however, isn’t sure if it’s happening at all. He suspects that its $170 million budget was too much for the network Showtime. If it comes to nothing, though, he will have no regrets. “It was one of the richest and most interesting six weeks of my life, sitting in a room with [the director] Todd Field, Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Craig bashing out the story. They’re extremely interesting people.”

Craig hasn’t asked him to touch up the script for the next 007 film, as Hare’s fellow state-of-the-nation playwright Jez Butterworth did for Skyfall and Spectre. He says he was asked to write a Bond film once and turned it down. He is busy with theatre, anyway. His most recent full-length play, The Moderate Soprano, about the man who set up the Glyndebourne festival, moves to the West End in April. His next, I’m Not Running, opens at the National in October. This one’s new territory is to contrast our love of principled individuals with our distrust of organisations. “We believe in the power of the individual to do good. As soon as anybody becomes a public figure, though, we despise them.”

So Hare is asking if we should try to work through political parties or through individual causes. “Clearly the wind is behind identity politics now and not behind joined-up politics. And that’s interesting. Is it enough, if your politics is simply the advancement of your own group? If you simply say, ‘As a woman I feel . . .’, ‘As a black person I feel . . .’, ‘As a playwright I feel . . .’, is that an adequate way of dealing with what is going on in society at the moment? Or is it a substitute for what is going on in society at the moment?”

I think we can guess where Hare’s sympathies lie. Naysayers — and Hare knows he is a divisive figure — will say that that’s the problem. His intelligence is not in doubt, but sometimes his characters articulate it too clearly. Early in Hare’s career, the Times critic Irving Wardle wrote that “David Hare pushes the characters around the stage to make them say what he wants them to say”.

“Rather than let them be people,” Hare says, continuing Wardle’s point. “And even if I didn’t agree with him, I thought it was disastrous that that was the impression I gave.” He admits that there have been occasions when he has let the thematic cart push the human-interest horse. Not that he’ll name them. “Because if I do that then I know that in a year’s time someone will say, ‘Even by his own admission, this play is a failure.’ They are all waiting out there to pounce on any chance piece of self-deprecation and beat me with it. And I don’t think I’m at all guilty of it now.”

For all his success, it doesn’t get any easier taking knocks. “It’s a paradox of the job that your thin skin is what makes you a playwright; in other words, you are sensitive to what is around you. I hope that means you are sensitive to other people’s suffering, but it also means that you are oversensitive to your own suffering.”

While bad reviews are a pain, audience indifference can be a killer. When he adapted Katherine Boo’s book Behind the Beautiful Forevers for the National in 2014, he sat behind two men who spent the first two hours of the play looking at their phones. Only towards the end did they get interested. “But those hours when they were looking at their phones were the worst hours of the year. Because it’s my failure. If I can’t involve them, I can’t blame them. It’s got to be my fault.”

He did a lot of looking inward recently when he wrote his memoir, The Blue Touch Paper. He looked back on winning a scholarship to Lancing College, going on to Cambridge and to precocious prominence as literary manager of the Royal Court at the age of 21 before launching his career as a playwright. He decided that he had never been an Angry Young Man like John Osborne and that earlier generation. He was a Bewildered Young Man.

“I used to think, ‘Everyone else seems to understand the world. I don’t.’ And because I was in some ways a social outsider, in not coming from so richly endowed a background as some of the boys in my school and university, I would feel, ‘This is all very odd — does nobody else feel that this is odd?’ I think that that proposal to the audience is still what I do. I still say, ‘I see it this way. Is there anyone out there who agrees with me?’ ”

It is hard, he admits, to claim that he is still some sort of interloper. “I can’t say that because I’ve been 45 years at the BBC, 45 years at the National. But if you ask me, ‘Is my sense of being slightly dislocated from how other people think still there?’, clearly it is.
I am not confident that my view of the world is right, but it is different. It doesn’t represent the common wisdom.” For almost 50 years it has been his ambition to be ahead of public taste, not following it. He wants to get there first — a determination hardened, if anything, by turning 70.

“I write quicker now because of the panic of death.” He laughs. “I am writing at very high speed because I have a lot to write. Almost by definition I am nearing the end of my writing life. So it’s horrible. I am under the cosh. I have got to get some things down before it’s too late.”

Collateral begins on BBC Two on February 12 at 9pm