DAVID HARE talking to RICHARD BOON, University of Leeds, author of About Hare (Faber)
Cottesloe Theatre, 27 January 2004
nota: o excerto destacado a vermelho representa o ponto de vista de Carlos Afonso Pereira sobre o texto de David Hare.
RB I saw The Permanent Way when it opened in York, and what struck me was that it seemed a bit of departure from your recent work.
DH Well, it wasn't my idea. It was the idea of Max Stafford-Clark who I worked with in the 1970s when he had a company called Joint Stock; his newer company is called Out of Joint, after a 15-year gap when he was running the Royal Court Theatre. He's someone whose principles of work I have a great deal of time and respect for, so when he came to me with the subject of the railways, I was at least interested to do the workshop, though a little bit nervous, it would be true to say, of the nerdish aspects of this subject.
RB It's not the most obvious subject for a play, is it?
DH No, but I like that. One of the things I think is wonderful about Michael Frayn is that he does nuclear physics, or German social democracy. There is something very exciting about someone as clever as Michael Frayn addressing himself to apparently undramatic material. It's wonderfully exciting when you see what it is that he sees in it.
RB Could you say something about the process by which the play was made. It's a very particular process, isn't it, with a company involved in going out and talking to people and gathering material?
DH Well, I did it in Via Dolorosa, but then I went by myself to Israel and Palestine and I was the only person collecting. But in this case we had a company of nine actors, and I had done a certain amount of preparation with a researcher. We had a list of people we wanted to see and then out the actors went and talked. One thing leads to another. You have nine people going out, maybe in groups of two of three, and then they come back and offer you an improvisation which is based on notes they have in front of them, so that they say exactly what the person said. So it was possible for a character to appear in the play without my ever having met them. In fact the first time I met the Squadron Leader, the person who saved the Bereaved Widow's life in the Potter's Bar crash, was at the third preview in London. He had already been well run in, entirely based on the actor, Lloyd Hutchinson, having met him and done the original report. I think actually two actors went to see him and came back with different reports, which I wrote up. Then obviously, with this particular material, there is a clear moral obligation which is quite complex, particularly when you are dealing with the suffering that people have been through. With someone like the Squadron Leader, who had been directly affected, I had to send him the material and say “This is how you are going to be represented, this is what I will have you saying. Are you at peace with this?” We had to change a certain amount that people had said. The area that a playwright operates in is always the difference between what people say and what they mean. So some of the speeches are direct reportage, if I felt the direct reportage was very powerful. Others are speeches that effectively I have written but which I feel represent what the person wanted to say, and by and large people have been pleased to say, “Yes, this is what I wanted to say, I just didn't put it like that”. The illusion is that I'm not present, but it's an illusion. I work like an artist, not like a journalist.
RB You're a famously meticulous writer. All the actors who've worked on your plays say that one of your scripts is like a musical score: it has to be got right. Judi Dench has said that if you get it slightly wrong, the whole thing goes. How does that square with working with other people's words, when you have not interfered?
DH Well I have interfered. I thought I'd read something because it's so fantastic. On some occasions, though not always, we had tape recorders. For the First Bereaved Mother, we had a tape recording and when I looked at the transcript, I found this word-for-word description of what it was like for two parents to wait for news of their son's death :
“On the night we were waiting to hear, we were standing in the dark, September – so the nights were getting dark already – making pots of tea and not drinking them – and we just stood in the kitchen. And I kept just saying 'Well if he's gone, it's written', and I felt as if this was coming from somewhere – and my husband said to me and it was in the dark - and he'd just made another cup of tea which he'd thrown away and he said 'Maureen' – (to Bereaved Father) You don't mind me saying this do you ? He said 'Maureen', and he was crying, and he said 'If Pete has gone you've got to forgive me'. And I said 'What do you mean?' And he said 'I'm not going to stay here, I'm going to go.' He was going to kill himself.”
Well, it's DH Lawrence. DH Lawrence couldn't write that. You didn't have to change a single word, it's just the most extraordinary evocation of a moment. By not changing a word you achieve something very powerful. On the other hand, with certain characters, by changing everything I could make it into music which I think reflected what they wanted to say. But, when I did that, I always made sure they were entirely happy with that.
RB In popular culture, the received myth is that in the face of disaster and tragedy, people behave rather badly. The experience in this play is that people behave extraordinarily well, and it seems to me one of the ways that happens is that the awful price that is paid empowers the bereaved and the survivors, who find things within themselves that they didn't know existed. One of these things may be to do with language – I'm talking about the mother who suddenly started using her dead lawyer son's language and saying things like “I put it to you...”
DH There are a lot of people who don't see this as a play about the railways at all, and I love that. There are people who see it as being about what it's now like at their own place of work – in other words it's run by managers who don't know what they're doing, and where management culture has replaced expertise culture. Particularly outside London there was a very powerful response to the play, not based on the railways but the railways seen as a metaphor. An American said to me “I see this entirely as a play about Aids/HIV, the mix of avoidable and unavoidable suffering.” The governments in America and here didn't respond very quickly to what was happening with HIV/Aids, it was left to people to organise themselves, in the way the gay community in New York and San Francisco have done, dealing with things you can't do anything about and things you can do something about. Very complicated questions arise when you have a mixture of those two things. So the people who see this play as a metaphor – and nothing to do with what the Americans call 'mass transit' – they're the people who are getting it. The play to me is about honour and dishonour; a group of people who are behaving honourably and another group who are behaving dishonourably.
RB What particularly came into my mind when I was watching it was the kind of silent courage exemplified by David Kelly. That sense of a figure who was traduced by the institutions, the press, the media, by parliamentary committee, by government – bodies which simply thought he was there to be manoeuvred, used, abused. It seemed not to have struck them that he might be a man of honour. That was what I found in it.
DH I really lost my cool with someone the other day because the charge that is made against this play is that the politicians are not represented, the political defence is not put. It's true that I didn't go to interview politicians because frankly they can't ascend to the level of truthfulness that is needed to be in this play. There wasn't any point in going to talk to John Prescott because I knew what John Prescott would tell me in advance. People who tell me this play is very unfair to John Prescott drive me insane, because it doesn't matter whether the play is unfair to John Prescott, what matters is whether John Prescott is fair to the bereaved and the survivors. That artistic charge that is laid against me makes me very angry, and what's interesting is that it's only laid against me by the metropolitan elite. The other day the deputy editor of The Times came up to me and said “I enjoyed your play, but it's very unfair to John Prescott.” I said, “You see one John Prescott because you're part of a group he wants to be nice to.” Of course he's going to be nice to the deputy editor of The Times, he's not an idiot. But he's been extremely rude to some people who suffered terribly in these crashes, and that double standard is partly what this play is addressing. I've always been very pro-politics and very pro-politician. Having written The Absence of War, and been part of a Labour party campaign, I've seen it the other way round. But what's going on in the country at the moment is a political elite that really are completely untethered from what people are feeling in the country at large. They just don't care what people think and feel; one group because they believe they can be re-elected and the other group because they don't think they will ever be re-elected. So you have this extraordinary situation in which they are not listening to people. That we found was a running theme.
RB You were talking about how this play has been received by different audiences…
DH Max had this wonderful policy of taking it to places where plays simply are not seen. We played the Sheffield working men's club where we had an arrangement, as I understand it, with some people with baseball bats who were hired to protect the cars while the show was going on. There were people who had never seen a play before. And in York, because it's a railway town, there were a lot of people from the railways. There was a wonderful audience discussion in which a man got up and said he enjoyed the play very much, but “doesn't Mr Hare know that the 7.28 for Nottingham doesn't leave from King's Cross?” He was absolutely right, got me bang to rights.
RB The word honour seems to be one that we should add to your list of old fashioned words, something you've talked about in a number of your plays over the years. Characters like John Morgan in Wetherby, who dismiss modern words like neurosis and psychology and paranoia, and like words like love and hate and anger… Does it seem to you that the values that those words represent are lost or hidden?
DH No, not in the slightest. As the Second Bereaved Mother says – people have been radicalised by grief, essentially. There was a wonderful speech, which she made to me. She said “I didn't have any politics. I grew up with the idea that there was right and wrong and tried to instil that in my children. But now that I've met powerful people, I see that there's a game going on and the game is to do with their holding on to power.” The play in a way is an affirmation of the fact that people do have very powerful values which are tested by the things that happen to them. But at the moment these are not soaking into the way the country is run, there's a fenced-off area where people are not being responsive. This present railway system was built to avoid anybody having responsibility, that's what it's finally about. To me the most horrifying moment in the play is when the man from GNER says he went to Hatfield terrified that the cause was going to be a wheel break. If it had been a wheel break, that would have been terrible for GNER. Then a policeman came up to him and said it wasn't a wheel break, it was the rail. And he says “Thank Christ, it's not us.” To me that's the most shocking thing in the play. He's a very nice man, and he said it absolutely unselfconsciously, as if he didn't know the moral implications of saying that. A buck-passing system has been invented. I have had to endure some PR rubbish from some organisation that claims to speak for the industry, saying the play is art but it's not fact. They asked if I would make a speech on the first night to support the people who are trying to make the railway industry better, saying the play is only a metaphor, it isn't the truth. I asked how he would defend the way the railway industry is treating the people affected by the Potters Bar crash? And he said, ”Oh yes, we know there are imperfections but at the moment there isn't anyone to take responsibility for Potters Bar.” My case is made for me. You have a private company that pretends it's sabotage, there's no evidence of sabotage, and so that is the excuse for nobody taking responsibility. It's shocking to everyone in the country except those people who have vested interests in that system, and their PR people.
RB You're contending against huge social and historical forces, aren't you?
DH But it's like the Widow says, when the taxi driver turns off the meter on hearing that they're going to a service for someone killed at Potters Bar. She says, “They know, you see. People know.” Everyone knows that this is a shameful system in which nobody's willing to take responsibility for anything, and yet we seem powerless to get that changed.
RB What sort of feedback have you had, if any, from victims or the bereaved?
DH We had a very difficult performance when 50 or 60 people came as a group to the last preview, mostly bereaved, some survivors. We warned them that the play is very upsetting to see if you've been in a train crash. It was a very difficult evening. I wouldn't speak for what people's true response was. It was noticeable that people who have had more time find it easier, in other words the people from Southall who have had four years since losing someone they loved, were in less distress than those who lost people in Potters Bar. It's simply time.
RB In one way this play completes what you might call an inadvertent quintet of plays. If you go back to Pravda in the 80s, through the trilogy in the 90s, now this play – we have five plays finding a home in this building, each one of which seems to have attempted a diagnosis of the health of the nation through its key institutions.
DH I'm always a bit nervous about this. For me this is much more a play about Blairism. I think it's taken time for writers to find a way to talk about Blairism. The myth is that when Thatcher came to power, at once a whole lot of angry writers started writing against her. It isn't true. It took about five years till Caryl Churchill wrote Top Girls, Alan Bleasdale wrote Boys from the Blackstuff, and Hanif Kureishi wrote My Beautiful Launderette. Suddenly you have a body of work. When there are big historical shifts like that, theatre doesn't work like journalism, and the suggestion that it is a form of journalism is untrue. You can't respond without an analysis and it may take years to get an analysis. For myself, I only began to understand Thatcherism by talking to Howard Brenton when we wrote Pravda in 1984, five years after Thatcher came to power. It takes time. The same has been true about Blairism, which has been a very difficult thing to describe. But you're beginning to see work about it now, particularly Paul Abbott, who is completely brilliant. State of Play and Shameless I think could only have been written under Blair. Dirty Pretty Things is another, and significantly directed by Stephen Frears who has a special gift for the contemporary. It's beginning to describe what Blairism is like, namely: Club Class/Economy Class culture. This is what I'm trying to describe in the first fifteen minutes of The Permanent Way, which plainly I wrote and which doesn't pretend to be documentary, where everyone's screaming about the frustrations of being a commuter. It taps into how people are feeling about a society that ought to be functioning and isn't.
RB In The Absence of War, the Labour leader George Jones, in the early 1990s says there's no point in belonging to another party because the Tories always win, so the only thing to do is join the Tories and then fuck it all up. That's what's actually happened now, isn't it?
DH Yes, it drives me absolutely nuts that they won't revive The Absence of War in London. I've suggested it to people who instantly lose my telephone number. But it's sitting there waiting to be done. It was done in Birmingham as part of the trilogy last year. It contains the analysis, briefly, which is that Blair is still following an Old Labour course. It's meant to be New Labour but it isn't. It's a reaction to Old Labour, meaning that you do what Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson call 'Eliminate the Negatives'. The two negatives which must be eliminated are that you must never be seen to be hostile to the City - and crudely that is the reason that the railways were not re-nationalised on the first day the Labour party came to power. It would give a signal that they were going to be hostile to the City. That is why we can't get a decent law on corporate killing: year after year the government says it's going to introduce a law on corporate killing which would satisfy everybody who has suffered in these crashes. We won't get a decent law on corporate killing because it's been promised to the City that there will be no such law. So you don't offend the City and you don't offend the Americans. If you're ever seen to separate yourself from American foreign policy, then, again, as a Labour government, you're dead. That explains the recent adventures. It's entirely in terms of this belief that a Labour government cannot survive now if it offends these two interest groups, the City and the Americans. More or less everything that Blair does is to me interpretable in terms of something that happened fifteen years ago: Neil Kinnock went to Washington and Ronald Reagan refused to see him. He sat in the room outside, and everyone in the Labour party said we're never going to go through that humiliation again. Now the papers are released in which Reagan says, “If we have to deal with Kinnock, we won't speak to him. We're not going to speak to an English government which has an anti-nuclear policy.” That's the dread. That explains English foreign policy and the tragedy of the railways. It comes out of thirteen years of powerlessness. For all Blair's talking about being a new party, no. A new party would be a party with an independent foreign policy and a party that was not frightened to have an independent attitude to taking back the railways. You feel, as you go round the country with this play, if Michael Howard is shrewd enough to offer to re-nationalise the railways, it's a huge vote-winner. I don't think either Max, whose idea this was, or I had any idea how profound an issue this is outside London.
Audience question
Have you ever recognised pragmatism, practical compromise in your plays? You know – like Gladstone finally discovering in his Midlothian speech, that you have to toe the line a bit.
DH The play we've been talking about, The Absence of War, is essentially a portrait of a Kinnock figure. It's about a man who essentially gets mashed in the middle of politics. I don't have the slightest problem with compromise. People in a society want different things, and the art of politics is the art of satisfying the fact that everybody wants something different. What is going on in terms of this bartering in the House tonight on the Education question, and there will be a vote at 7 o'clock, is actually the legitimate process of democracy, whether you like it or not. Some people will like there to be fees, some people won't, and you have to elect people and they have to fight it out. The idea that it's disgusting that deals are being made – no, not at all. That's democracy. As indeed Michael Frayn shows in his wonderful play. Nasty little deals have to be done all the time. That's fine. But principle has to come into things somewhere.
Audience question
I'm fascinated by your comments on political disenfranchisement because I would describe myself in that manner. The thing that comes across to me when you look at the railways is that the victims are all sitting there saying the government can be trusted and it's only when they come up against the establishment that they realise how bad and corrupt it is, and how people don't care about them. I'm looking for a solution. Any ideas?
DH No, but the other thing that annoys me about politicians is how they're now blaming it on apathy. It isn't apathy, it's anger. The idea that everybody is turned off by politics – No mate, they're turned off by you. They're turned off by the set of politicians who for some reason seem to have become an elite completely separated from the rest of us. You can see their antennae go up the minute they come near this play. It's telling them things they don't want to hear.
Audience question
Have you considered writing a play about prisoners and prisons?
DH I did, with Murmuring Judges. It's about how the three parts of the legal system don't really speak to each other. The police are out there having tremendous fun, driving fast cars up pavements and thoroughly enjoying themselves, up the adventurous end; the lawyers are making huge amounts of money, never seeing the places they confine the criminals; and I did go round a lot of prisons and find this extraordinary sense of people feeling that they are up the dirty end and nobody cares. They are almost comically self-pitying, but on the other hand it's true. I met a lot of judges who were sending people to prison and had never been to one. I believe now it's part of magistrate training to go into prison. Justice Wolf changed the system. But I did say to a judge, “Do you have any idea what you are consigning people to? Don't you think it would be a good idea, considering that's sort of your main job?” But he wasn't interested. He said “I don't need to know. I'm dispensing something called justice.”
Audience question
Do you think the situation in the Middle East has changed very much since you wrote and performed Via Dolorosa?
DH Well, it's obviously worsened, hasn't it? I can't begin to address the hugeness of it, but I think the worst thing about what's happened in Iraq is that a self-evidently insincere gesture was made by Bush to placate Blair. I'm sure Blair in good faith said “I want a road map for the Middle East in order that I can sell the Iraq war. You've got to do this for me because I'm supporting you.” The road map had insincerity written all over it, it just never had a moment of conviction from anyone in the American administration, including, I'm afraid to say, Colin Powell, who never looked as if he believed in it. Everybody knows that there is no solution from within the area. The idea that the principal player outside the area was launching something in bad faith – as Bush did as a political sop to Blair, and which is now forgotten anyway – did untold harm. The book by Ron Suskind about Paul O'Neill describes the very first meeting of the National Security Council. George Bush said “We're going to get out of this situation. Clinton put too much into it. It didn't bring him any profit. Why should I get involved?” That basically is the attitude, but everyone knows no solution is going to come from within.
Audience question
When you did The Absence of War, you obviously did as much research as you did for The Permanent Way, but then you created your own story, and it was very much a fictional play, saying what you wanted to say about the election and the Labour party. Did you feel constrained by the structure of The Permanent Way?
DH I just thought the story was so shocking that I didn't want to get in the way. And it's an illusion. It's craft. Actually I'm all over it, but I don't want to be seen. It's a kind of writing that I admire very much in the theatre and in novels. I believe Flaubert calls it 'scientific absence'. You simply shouldn't be aware of the personality of the author at all. It did seem to me that when you were dealing with such incredibly volatile feelings, what my attitude is, is hardly relevant. What matters is what they've got to say. With the fictionalising of The Absence of War, it's always troubled me that it wasn't fictionalised enough and so I was left with this awful Madame Tussaud's critical reaction – “But John Thaw doesn't look like Neil Kinnock. Neil Kinnock has red hair”. That was the level at which it was reviewed. That was in a way my own fault, in other words the fiction wasn't far enough away from the 1992 election. Having said that, I think that 10 years on the play is much easier to see. When the trilogy was revived last year in Birmingham there was a lot of eating of critical hats, some people even saying The Absence of War was the best of the plays in the trilogy. I think the play can now be seen more clearly because the historical events it's based on have been receding. So if anyone here runs a theatre....
Audience question
I've always maintained, but it now seems somewhat naive, that if you just give people reported statistics, nothing will change. You have to use art – great drama, great novels. It seems to me that if people like politicians come to this play, they're not going to be affected, just defensive. How do you get through to these people?
DH I don't know. It's such a difficult question. I suppose Zola and J'Accuse is the one we all cite, and it is always said that it was a play which started the Chinese Revolution. I'm always told that but nobody has ever told me the title of the play. You have absolutely no idea. You throw the stone and hope the ripples go out. This play is a rallying point, for better or worse, even if it confirms people in their own feelings, just makes people feel less lonely about what they feel. But Max and I both thought it was important to do it at the National because we feel it's so important that this theatre addresses this kind of issue. What the effect will be, I don't know. I hope it will be to give some politicians some terrible evenings. I agree with you, you can watch documentaries, read articles, read statistics, but I didn't know the full shock of the story until I laid it out. The thing that's common to all audiences is that you hear people saying “Is that really true? Did that really happen?” because certain parts of it are so unbelievable that you just can't believe that's the story. For instance, when a woman has to learn her son is dead by turning on Cefax. You can't believe that happens. How can a system be failing at that level? Once you see the whole span of the story, it's something that journalism can't do, and that's why I deeply resent it when people say plays like this are journalism. They're not.
Audience question
The Tories said they were going to consult you about their rail policy. I know Michael Howard came to see the play a few weeks ago. Have they consulted you? And is the real reason you didn't interview any politicians that they might have given you complicated answers that wouldn't lend themselves to good drama?
