DAVID HARE, PLAYWRIGHT, ON THE RECORD BY PHONE …



Excerpted interview with David Hare, Playwright

On the record by phone, Sep. 21, 2009:

WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE PLAY?

Not a great deal. Having five years ago written a play about Iraq, because (National Theatre artistic director) Nick Hytner said you couldn’t have something that calls itself a national theater that didn’t have something about the invasion of Iraq, in that calendar year after the invasion, in the following year, well that was basically the national theater saying we’ve got to be a national theater. Well, five years later he came crawling back to me saying, we’ve got to be a national theater again. I had avoided a whole lot of people who had been saying to me, you should be writing about this. But I think it was sort of irresistible, in return for the idea that in a big theater we would be able to be as open as possible. Nowadays in big subsidized theatres, the reparatory – I don’t mean that it’s less quality, but it’s less risky. Fewer risks are taken, inevitably. So it’s nice to....do something impromptu, which I’m still writing.

WHAT DID NICHOLAS HYTNER SAY?

He said this is the most incredible story and it’s very hard for outsiders to get the hang of it. And I said I’ve got absolutely no grasp of money at all. When I go to a traveller’s exchange place I can never work out if the exchange rate is working in my favour. I’m economically illiterate, I’ve never invested money. When I was young I was a socialist and I disapproved of it. And now, having learned what I’ve learned in the last few months, it’s confirmed me in my decision. And because I’ve been lucky enough to be able to make my living without ever investing, I’ve never thought about it. So, in a sense what Nick was saying is, look, this is a specialist subject that the majority of people feel excluded from. They can’t read the Financial Times, they don’t know how to read the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. And Nick said, can you explain it? And I said I am very well qualified to explain it in that I’m completely ignorant and have no aptitude.

SO WHO DID YOU TALK TO TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE CRISIS?

I talked to about 30 or 35 people who in different ways have been mixed up in the story, from 10 or 15 years ago, from what you might call the origins of the boom and therefore the outcome of the bust.

WERE THEY MOSTLY IN LONDON? All over the place, really.

SO, BANKERS AND REGULATORS AND THE LIKE?

Yeah, but also people who were affected by it. It’s much more difficult, interestingly, to get to speak to its victims. If you try and find people whose houses have been taken away, or for instance, try and talk to working bailiffs about their day, they are a lot less – the victims are a lot less willing to talk than the originators. Because they feel foolish. They feel, I really don’t want to expose myself because I’m revealing myself to be somebody who has lost at the game of finance. Whereas the people who caused all the trouble are more than happy to talk because they’re desperate to put their...rationalization on the record. You know, you notice that Alan Greenspan has been much more forthcoming during this period than he ever was when he was running the Federal Reserve.

DID YOU MANAGE TO TALK TO HIM AS WELL? No, I didn’t. I didn’t attempt to speak to him.

I’VE READ THAT WHAT YOU’RE WORKING ON IS MORE A NARRATIVE THAN A PLAY. IS THAT RIGHT?

Yes, it is. We found with “Stuff Happens” (Hare’s play about Iraq) that although there were many books and pieces of journalism which addressed parts of the story, there wasn’t anywhere you could go...and for a time after it was published, “Stuff Happens” was actually the only book which took you through from the origins – namely, the response to 9/11 -- right through to the day of the invasion (of Iraq), and told it as one narrative. And I think that is something which traditionally history plays in the theater do terribly well. Where you sit there for 90 minutes or two hours or two-and-a-half hours and the whole story is laid out in front of you.

It was interesting the number of bankers who referred me to Bremner, Bird and Fortune – particularly when I was trying to understand credit default swaps. They would say, there’s an excellent sketch between John Fortune and John Bird which actually sums the whole thing up. And when you see a sketch from that show, you can tell – because I now can tell who understands this subject and who doesn’t– and I think John Bird and John Fortune did really understand it. (Here’s a link to one of the sketches on YouTube, if you want to use this link or track down an “official” link from their production company, which appears to be Vera Productions: )

I’VE HEARD YOU ARE A CHARACTER IN THIS PLAY. IS THAT RIGHT?

I am, yeah. I am represented by another actor. It dramatizes my encounters, really. You know, I’ve had a very interesting few months. I don’t play myself....It’s much more a dramatization rather than a monologue.

SO THERE WILL BE OTHER PEOPLE ON THE STAGE? Loads of people.

WHAT DOES THEATER HAVE TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS TOPIC? Understanding, I think. However much television and journalism tells us that it’s trying to make it easy for us, really.... when we had a run-through (of the play before an audience), young people said, I feel really empowered by this because I will now understand what they’re talking about on Newsnight, and up till now, I never understood what they were talking about. It is in the bankers’ own interest -- they are a priesthood. And they want to talk in terms the general public don’t understand because it suits them that we don’t understand what they did. And, you know, I was having a very interesting conversation with a financial journalist the other day about, is it that finance is now so complex that it cannot be understood except by the very few, or is it that they deliberately use language intended to put us all off? When you get to CDOs and CDOs squared and mezzanine products, then you really do feel, ok, this is like talking about transubstantiation – this is just a priesthood protecting its rite. My job is to put it in language that everybody will understand. The very fact that almost nobody, all the time that securitized credit arrangements were growing like the iceberg underneath the sea, the absolute poverty of resources – perfectly respectable financial journalists were not covering the subject of securitized credit arrangements at all! The story went more or less unreported year after year. The reason for that is simply that it was being talked about in a way that general financial journalists couldn’t understand. Even financial journalists couldn’t understand! And yet the scale of what was going on was absolutely massive compared with the trading which they traditionally reported.

DO YOU SEE ANY PITFALLS IN RESPONDING TO THIS CRISIS QUITE QUICKLY? RATHER THAN WAITING FIVE YEARS AND WRITING SOMETHING THEN?

No. To be honest, somebody said, which I think is true, that out of the Depression came very great work – the Grapes of Wrath. This play doesn’t pretend to be that kind of (work), about the emotional impact of what’s happening. You know when I wrote “Stuff Happens,” the play’s basic thesis, which was that a group of neoconservatives hijacked 9-11 for their own purposes, and that essentially our Prime Minster was snowed by a theoretically, in quotes, much stupider man into doing something foolish, that thesis was extremely controversial and it was by no means accepted as the general history of those events. In the five or six years since, it’s become the orthodox history of those events. If I sat down with “Stuff Happens” today, the only question that I would go back and reconsider is whether in fact Blair collaborated with Bush in the proposal of the venture even earlier than I guessed. That’s the only thing I would change. But the rest of it has all been vindicated by history. So sometimes the first draft of history is not so inaccurate.

HOW DOES THIS PLAY FIT INTO THE OTHER THINGS YOU’VE WRITTEN, LIKE “STUFF HAPPENS” AND “WALL,” YOUR MONOLOGUE ABOUT ISRAEL AND PALESTINE?

I don think it really fits with Wall. I think it’s more that I’ve been writing about New Labour for a long time. I wrote “The Absence of War” in the early 90s, which was a play essentially based on (former Labour Party leader Neil) Kinnock’s campaign and Kinnock’s defeat. Which if you like was the origins of New Labour. So much came out of that defeat. When Labour lost, it lost definitively, and that’s when Blair and Brown began to conceive what they called The Project. Then I wrote about the crisis of The Project, which I think was the Iraq invasion, I wrote “Gethsemane,” which is about the decline of The Project and the need for it to fund itself privately and what the moral and political consequences of that have been, and then I would take the current financial crisis to be the collapse of The Project. This is the moment at which The Project gets its comeuppance.

YOU SEE THE FINANCIAL CRISIS THROUGH THAT LENS – NEW LABOUR? Oh, completely. New Labour went along with deregulation, it went along with the growth of the financial sector, it went along with these practices. It never enquired into what was going into the City because as long as the cash cow was providing I think 27% of the national tax take, Brown and Blair were not concerned to look at where the money was coming from.

SO IS THE PLAY MOSTLY U.K.-FOCUSED? No, no, it’s not. It’s all over the world.

WOULD YOU SAY LONDON IS KNOWN FOR STAGING CONTEMPORARY HISTORY?

Yes, totally. I think American theater seems – to us it seems very serene....in its indifference to the passage of history. I’m not saying there aren’t great American writers, but apart from Tony Kushner and Wallace Shawn they tend to be writers who are more concerned to write about what I believe is called the human condition.

LIKE “AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY”?

Exactly. You know, the family play. Now of course a lot of people who write those kind of plays would say that they had reverberations and implications about history. Of course they do. But we in Britain, it is true, maybe because we’ve been more rocked by history in the 20th century, and also because of the example of our great national writer, Shakespeare, tend to believe that who you are is crucially affected by how you got here and where you’re heading. So we don’t, I don’t hear many British playwrights use that phrase -- “the human condition.” Whereas I do hear it a lot (in the U.S.), as if you could generalize about humanity. I think we in Britain tend to believe that the lot of a Chinese peasant is very, very different to the lot of a banker in Canary Wharf, and we’re interested in the reasons about why the bankers are behaving the way they are, and we tie those reasons to the movement of history. So history is sweeping across the stage.

WHAT OTHER PLAYS WOULD YOU PUT IN THAT CATEGORY?

Well, “Enron” is obviously an example of exactly that. Caryl Churchill (who wrote “Serious Money”) is an obvious example. Howard Brenton also writes about history. Even, I would say, Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia” –very much about the movement of ideas in society. It was a classic piece of epic British playwriting, and bloody good it was, too.

IS THERE A REASON WHY FINANCE HASN’T BEEN A BIG TOPIC FOR THEATER BEFORE?

Howard Davies, who is director of the London School of Economics -- I went to talk on a panel about a year ago and he, as a cultured man, was quite vociferous on the subject of why is nobody in the culture looking at us? If nothing else, Canary Wharf is a fascinating social phenomenon. Where are the social novelists who are writing about it? I think it’s probably taken the catastrophe in order to turn everybody’s attention to finance. Maybe you may well criticize us for that. We have been late to the party, it’s true.

WOULD YOU SAY YOUR PLAY IS AN INDICTMENT OF WHAT HAPPENED? No, it’s not a banker-bashing – there doesn’t seem any point in a banker-bashing piece. Mine’s more about the profounder issues that I believe are raised by what has happened, which I’m reluctant to discuss. I’d rather leave it. But I think that obviously this has raised all sorts of very profound questions about western democracies and also it’s raised very profound questions about the capitalist system. And I don’t think it’s coincidence that politics in both big English-speaking countries has taken a very ugly turn. I think the Republicans are in a very bad mode because the free market in which they believe has not covered itself in glory in the last 18 months. And so they are in the mood of people who know their philosophy has been discredited. And some of the ugliness of the summer I think is to do with that. And on this side of the Atlantic you can see that the economic crisis was followed by an intense political crisis which has left everybody in Britain believing that everyone in public life is in it for themselves. Obviously the banking crisis has contributed to that feeling, since it’s so clear that so many bankers have no sense of responsibility to outside society at all, and simply rip out whatever sums of money they fancy, on the grounds that, you know, they work in an ice cream factory so they can take as much ice cream home as they want. And that does engender tremendous cynicism among people outside those blessed professions.

HOW ARE YOU HOPING AUDIENCES WILL REACT TO YOUR PLAY? WHAT ARE YOU HOPING THEY’LL TAKE AWAY FROM IT?

I would hope that it’s just the prism. The thing you’re always trying to do in any work of art is, you hope they’re going to be reminded of it a week later, two weeks later, four weeks later, when they look at something differently. That’s what a great work of art does to me. I then see things that I would never have seen. And so you just see the world a little differently, don’t you? When you have that, when a template of how to look at it has been provided for you. And that’s what I hope to do. But the proof of the play will be in the weeks and months to come.

ENDS

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