Reconstruction of the past can rarely be complete. While the physical surroundings and style of a period can be invoked, we can never reconstruct how exactly people feel or think at a given moment. I say this because it involves the question of honesty – a theme which David Hare, one of Britain’s major playwrights, constantly explores. But reconstruction also involves the question of truth: to what extent does a writer reconstruct the past in order to confirm people’s view of a given period?

Take the Second World War. In Hare’s Licking Hitler, a television play set in a wartime research unit which specialises in black propaganda, the underlying theme is the problem of lying and the inherent corruption that goes with it. In some respects, Hare was disappointed at the response to the play: he found that people only acknowledged the things they were acquainted with, rather than beginning to understand the nature of propaganda work and its effects on the individual. Many refused to see the War in terms of compromise, yet for Hare that was one of the factors which sustained the War effort.

When I was writing Licking Hitler (BBC TV play, 1978) I had Orwell in mind. Because Orwell was a radical he had to decide what he was going to do during the War. As it turned out, he didn’t do that much. He said there were only three things a radical could do – accept it, endure it, or record it. And so I posed the idea of the radical in Archie (one of the main propagandists in Licking Hitler), who is in fact doing disgusting work. But his attitude is one of acceptance. As he says ‘Just accept it; that’s all you can do. I hate it, but accept it.’

But acceptance can fall into the realm of compromise – compromising in order to maintain a system which, as Hare points out, is to some degree based on corruption. What happens if you don’t accept – as happened with Anna (one of the German translators)? ‘It is simple. The moment Anna says “No”. The moment when she says “I don’t accept”, she is finished.’

I would think that Hare doesn’t see acceptance or rejection in terms of black and white in this particular play. Archie accepts the system, no matter how corrupt it is, because he doesn’t believe in it. His world is grey to the extent that lying creates that area where you believe you can beat the system through joining it equipped with tools of corruption; lying also creates destruction. Is it easier to change from within, or does lying simply act as a convenient mechanism which attempts to kill self-doubt?

And self-doubt is predominant in Hare’s plays – the self-doubt of consciousness. How can people be sincere in a corrupt world? Hare gets around the problem by creating the half world –

the half world where people are not convinced by the real good. I don’t like to simplify my characters. What I try to do is not make people unrealistically morally right. I don’t draw simple characters. People’s moral engagements with other people are much more complex. Everybody thinks themselves good. I’ve never met anybody who thinks that he is evil. I think that people go about presenting a version of themselves and because of this, it is clear that people’s treatment of their own moral lives are extremely complicated. In all my plays, I’ve written that to do good is very hard; to do good looks evil, but it isn’t like that at all. My plays are based on the idea that to live morally is a choice – I don’t think there’s any morality at large in the universe and I don’t believe that the universe is moral in the sense that if I do something wrong, then I’ll be punished. But I can make a choice which is to live or not to live a moral life. I receive criticisms of my work – criticisms which argue that I query my good characters and their best characteristics. This is true. I tend to argue against my own good characters, possibly because I’m embarrassed since they often represent things that I represent. But what I’m saying is that given the present state of society, it is very difficult to live a moral life.

But what does Hare mean by ‘moral’? Looking at Dreams of Leaving (a television play written in 1979 and dealing with a journalist’s relationship with a girl): the play unfolds into a spectacular rendering of self-doubt and deceit, and a rendering of despair from which there seems no escape, not even in madness.

What I’m writing about in this play and in the plays of this period are about those people who are forced to live together in cities and those people who have a selfconsciousness about themselves and who feel that ‘well, we have money and we’re intelligent but certainly unhappy’. The play is about the fact that you cannot run away once you attain self-consciousness. William (the journalist) tried to run away. He ends up settling for a woman he doesn’t really love and for children he doesn’t really want. He pays the appalling price – the pathetic dream about a girl who will not sleep with him.

Of course the propostion Caroline presents to him is extraordinarily difficult. She simply says ‘I will love you but I can’t sleep with you’. I think that this is a fantastically difficult thing to say to somebody. The story of how he is incapable of accepting that love; the story of how he escapes from it, shows how unsuccessfully he attempts to deal with responsibility and honesty. Yes, it is true that Caroline is not altogether somebody I admire, that is to say she knows it’s a slum life but she isn’t actually doing anything about it. Her own life is pretty slum-like – moving from one slum-like profession to another, not exactly doing good work. Caroline seems to have smothered self-doubt.

Hare’s plays are open to misrepresentation because they question our presuppositions and the validity of choice, compromise and responsibility. They are also frequently misinterpreted because of the way he reconstructs the past.

I can give you an example of this. People came up to me after they saw Licking Hitler and said how they enjoyed the atmosphere of the house. But that was so unimportant to me. It was the same with Plenty (performed in 1978 – a play exploring the corruption of lying) but for me, the historical reconstruction is not terribly interesting. It’s a labour of duty which I do purely in order to Jure the audience in. The thing is you are never going to be able to control your audience. They go into the theatre with too many things on their minds so the are not really concentrating terribly hard. My strategy is to try to Jure the audience in and then they might begin to think.

The method I chose in Knuckle (1974 – a thriller heavily circumscribed by the nature and effects of corruption) was polemical. I wouldn’t write like that now. You can’t lecture to audiences about the state of the world. I try instead to write a play where audiences are sucked into a general atmosphere and hopefully by making moral decisions about the characters on stage, whether they like them or not, at least I feel they Jearn something about their own lives and values.

Hare has consistently maintained that drama, and the use of the theatre, is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done. ‘A play is what happens between the stage and the audience. What I’ve been trying to do in my later plays is to present them in such a way that the audience learn something about their own values.’

If Hare feels a certain despair with audiences (though he thinks awareness and general questioning is increasing), he has a certain disdain for the role of the intellectual in society – the idea that the intellectual can change things is no longer held by Hare as feasible. He sees the world, as he treats the characters in his plays, in terms of compromise:

I believe that people are frightened. There is a general sense of fear in the air. Most of all, people fear that the Good Life, the materialistically Good Life, is coming to an end – that it can’t go on. This is best translated into resentment against those who are going to rock the boat and the fear that to hold onto what we have in materialistic terms is going to be more and more difficult in this barbaric world . Anybody that’s going to rock the boat will not be welcomed at the dinner table.

I suppose Hare is getting at the fact that if we don’t belong to anything then the only escape is to madness: take the case of Caroline in Dreams of Leaving – she went mad because she chose to go mad…Take Slag (a feminist play written in 1970, in which none of the characters has a clue what their responsibilities and choices entail) where the characters bind themselves to a pact – ’I do solemnly promise .. . to abstain from all forms and varieties of sexual intercourse … in order to work towards the establishment of a truly socialist society…’ Yet as Hare points out,

they only say yes without knowing what the rules are. If you don’t know how to belong, then you don’t belong. The bourgeois conspiracy is powerful in this sense. The old bourgeois intellectualism is now out of fashion but what has taken its place is a respectable bohemianism – which is a sort of shabby sub-Establishment culture to which I suppose I belong. I belong to the sub-Establishment which has criticised the power of the Establishment but has never challenged it and that is a perfect historical description of the role of the intellectual in Britain.

Hare, then, is critical of the intellectual, critical of the Good Life, critical of the fact that people think the Good Life consists only of cars and meals and wine. ‘That this Good Life could be for me is absurd…it’s ridiculous…the Good Life is hardly a choice … ‘, he is critical of people, of their accepting so much and their continuing to exist through objectification of themselves:

That’s what I hope from my plays – that they will incite people to have the courage of their own convictions…there is a jealousy in my plays for those characters who see the outside world as enough. If I see myself from the outside – externally – then the external descriptions of what I am will be pleasant and reassuring. Those lives without psychology – those lives who never move away from the outside view of the world – this is what people only want- the belief that things from the outside are the real state of things…

Hare’s ‘panacea’ for society is hardly reassuring – in fact it’s naive. In Fanshen (a play based on a Chinese village, written in 1976) he argued the case for the just society, but he comments,

On the other hand, I believe that there is no justice. You still see people going about the streets poor and Thatcher is still in power. I can’t make up my mind easily. What I am sure about is that my Jove and my sympathy lies with those who seek justice however ludicrously they do so. That was the best thing about the Sixties. I remember somebody asking me what it meant for me. If it meant anything at all, it was that it had a better way of looking at the world…

The question remains – would you have David Hare to dinner…?