David Hare: If Thatcher had been in charge during Covid, ‘I don't think so many people would be dead’

“I’ve had a brutal round of illnesses,” David Hare tells me, soon after we’ve sat down to talk in the foyer of the Bridge Theatre in London. The first is already well-documented: on March 16 2020, the man once described by The Washington Post as “the premiere political dramatist writing in English” caught Covid. He fell ill – oddly enough – on the same day that Number 10 pronouncements (effectively) closed theatres.

Almost no sooner had he recovered than he’d written Beat the Devil – a short, sharp monologue that fused a description of Hare’s experience of the virus with his “survivor’s rage” at the Government for its handling of the crisis. Staged at the Bridge by Nicholas Hytner and starring Ralph Fiennes, it spearheaded theatre’s comeback that autumn.

Now, as Hare returns to the same venue with a far bigger play – Straight Line Crazy, about the indomitable US urban planner Robert Moses (1888-1981) – once again starring Fiennes and directed by Hytner, he reveals that he contended with another “potentially life-threatening” condition last year. “I had leukaemia,” he says, “but I’ve got through it, thank goodness. It has been a precarious time… the presence of mortality is very strong now.”

Tall, debonair and distinguished, his blue eyes twinkling with an amused, alert detachment, Hare, 74, credits his survival to modern medicine. “The advances in haematology are astonishing,” he says. “I’ve been treated with drugs that weren’t available five or 10 years ago. I’m told that it’s one of the most positive [medical] departments to be working in at the moment, because people who would have suffered a great deal don’t suffer at all.”

Conversely, when he was struck down by Covid, he avoided hospital at all costs, even during “a bad 48 hours when I was very ill” in which he was advised to go to the Royal Free, near his home in Hampstead. “At that point, it was a war zone. I’d read too much about people being put on ventilators. I saved my own life by refusing to go into hospital. My GP later said to me: ‘You made the right call.’ ”

Since his recovery he has “streamlined” his daily life to prioritise his writing – and discovered that “if you just write, you will write an awful lot.” Another new play, subject and title undisclosed, already sits waiting to be staged.

In Beat the Devil, Hare described emerging from Covid with a newfound appreciation of the little things in life: “Unexpectedly, my character now allows me to say things like, ‘This is a beautiful glass of water.’ ” Today, he reaffirms that he has “become a bit more of a hippy since I’ve been ill” – and talks in glowing terms about Nicole Farhi, the former fashion designer whom he married in 1992 (having divorced Margaret Matheson, his first wife, and mother of their three children, 12 years earlier): “I lucked into meeting a woman with whom I’ve been incredibly happy.”

But, in the thick of the pandemic, this famously left-leaning writer suffered pangs for a far more unexpected woman: Margaret Thatcher. “For the first time in my life, I found myself wishing for Thatcher,” he says. “You knew that, as a scientist and a politician, she would have been right across the detail. She would have been a superb tank commander and [had she been in charge] I don’t think so many people would be dead. She had a level of competence the present incumbent doesn’t have in the slightest.”

You could characterise Hare’s life, crudely, as one of unlikely social escape, and creative survival. In the realm of subsidised theatre, he has been a colossus: a zeitgeist-defining “house” writer at the National under the regimes of Richard Eyre (1987-97) and Hytner (2003-15), producing the Hare Trilogy, looking at major British institutions, Stuff Happens, about the run-up to the Iraq War, and much else besides. He has also achieved his share of red-carpet success: West End and Broadway runs, accolades and awards. The cream of British acting talent – Dench, Gambon, Hopkins, Nighy and Smith – as well as international stars such as Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman have signed up for scripts in which, as Hytner puts it, Hare’s “seriousness of purpose goes hand-in-hand with a showman’s ability to keep an audience gripped and entertained”.

These days, it’s all too easy to view Hare, who was knighted in 1998, as a privileged establishment elder. Yet his starting point in theatre was radical and unruly – in the late 1960s, he co-founded the touring company Portable, which meant much rattling around the country in vans – and his roots are far from lofty.

The younger of two children, he was born in St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex, in 1947, his parents later moving to a semi-detached house in nearby Bexhill. The picture he paints in his 2015 memoir The Blue Touch Paper is one of stultifying middle-class conformity; self-denial on the domestic front punctuated with rare visits home by Father, a globe-trotting purser, who would splash the cash but was parsimonious with paternal affection. Looking back, Hare sums up his father’s “perpetual absence” in one word: “horrendous”.

After winning a scholarship to Lancing College, Hare read English at Cambridge, where he felt like a perpetual outsider since, as he puts it now: “I wasn’t cut from the rib-eye of the middle-class like most of the people around me.” In the book, he pithily dismisses his narrow degree as leaving him and his peers “immobilised by a shared disappointment”.

Part of that disappointment, he explains now, was the revelation he’d had prior to university that life was more colourful and mind-expanding over in the States. As he talks about Straight Line Crazy, memories of a transformative teenage odyssey – which took in California, the South and Washington DC and wound up in New York in 1965 – come flooding back.

“There was this extraordinary sense of a society changing,” he recalls. “Teenage culture was rampant. It was one of the most optimistic places I’ve ever been. Whenever I hear Martin Luther King’s voice I tear up, because I remember that time.” In New York, he struggled to make a living selling vacuum cleaners. “I was completely hopeless. A kindly old salesman used to give me some of his sales because I was working on commission.”

Though it put him within sniffing distance of capitalism’s impoverished underbelly, Hare remains romantic about the US. The contrast to his late compatriot, Harold Pinter – who used his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech to attack America’s “quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good” – could hardly be starker.

“I couldn’t bring myself to hate America as he did, because I’ve seen its idealistic and civic side,” Hare tells me. “I always thought Harold’s anti-Americanism was slightly absurd. I wasn’t sympathetic to the idea that there’s something fundamentally evil about America. I thought it was, like us, a society in conflict about important things.”

The subject of Robert Moses was suggested by Hytner, though Hare had already devoured the 1,300-page 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Robert Caro. The Power Broker offers an exhaustive survey of Moses and his methods, which left New York and other places transformed – his legacy including bridges and expressways, as well as large state parks – yet often at the expense of poor, ethnic minority neighbourhoods, with a toxic premium placed on the car.

The bulldozing impact of Moses’s vision is freshly depicted in Steven Spielberg’s recent reboot of West Side Story; the film features urban renewal signs and wrecking balls looming over the local communities, who are shown marching against change as well as – of course – fighting fatally over turf.

Hare’s play is structured around two contrasting moments in Moses’s trajectory from hero of the masses to popular villain: the battle over his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to push an expressway through Washington Square in Manhattan in the mid-1950s; and an earlier assault on wealthy privilege in the bid to make Long Island a popular recreational destination.

“In 1926, Moses is an idealist, trying to get people out on to the beaches,” says Hare. “He wanted to see to it that working-class and middle-class lives were liberated from awfulness. That remains the goal even though the methods become completely rigid.”

The piece has both a historic application to Britain and also a new topical resonance. “I’m old enough to remember the principle of conservation being something that was for people in tweed suits, old fogeys saying, ‘We must preserve that Georgian terrace.’ It was only when they looked at modern city centres, places like the Birmingham Bull Ring, and realised they had created hell, that [more] people started talking about conservation.”

Hare grins. “If I say: ‘I’ve written a play about urban planning,’ that doesn’t sound like the most interesting subject in the world. But the pandemic has meant that changes that would have taken 10-15 years have happened in two years. Retail has decayed, cities are hollowed out, crime is rising. How we regenerate our cities is now at the top of the agenda.

“What I love about this subject,” he continues, “is that I’m not giving a handle to the audience, saying: this is the correct way to look at Robert Moses. I hope you go out arguing about him. I don’t see him as good or bad, but as someone who gets trapped by his ideas.”

Candidly, he acknowledges there are autobiographical elements in his portrayal of Moses as an obdurate man who “has to fight so hard for what he wants that he becomes used to dismissing all criticism.” Hare has, likewise, been attacked over the years, “so I’ve drawn in upon myself to keep going.

“My instinct was always to take on conflict,” he adds. “But I don’t think it made me a particularly attractive human being.” He revisits an old favourite line from Cocteau: “ ‘Whatever they criticise you for, intensify it.’ I love that. I still feel the right to write exactly what I want, and to live with the consequences. If someone on Twitter then objects to that, so be it.”

Still, Hare retains a unique capacity, possibly enviable to younger writers, to cause a stir online whenever he makes a pronouncement in the press. He irked some in the theatre community when he observed last year that agenda-setting plays were in short supply – a point he reiterates now.

He suggests, for example, that Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem – first seen in 2009 and set for a West End revival next month – “is successful, but if you say its name to people who don’t follow the theatre, they’ve never heard of it, not in the way they’ve heard of Look Back in Anger, The Caretaker, or Waiting for Godot. One of the reasons theatre doesn’t have [widespread] influence is that no one has written one of those plays for a long time. Is that still possible or is theatre being pushed aside in the 21st century?”

He also fears for the future of swathes of the canon. “Is any theatre at the moment performing any play at all written between 1610 and 1950, the so-called repertory?” he asks. “It’s as if we see Shakespeare and there’s a gap until Rattigan,” – who died in 1977, aged 66 – “appears. It has happened in the past 10 years. It’s very peculiar. I don’t think it’s a political question, that it’s now unacceptable to perform Jonson, Webster or Shaw. It’s fashion. We don’t know how to do old plays.”

Not so long ago he was concerned to read National Theatre director Rufus Norris discounting a “fairly straight” approach to European classics, appearing to suggest instead, as Hare puts it, that “we can only perform Chekhov if he’s transposed to another culture. I simply don’t understand that.”

Has Hare taken Norris to task over it? “I haven’t had that conversation,” he says. “The days when I had influence at the National are completely gone. I feel like a retired cricketer who can’t leave the pitch.”

The title poem in We Travelled, a recent collection of Hare’s essays and verse, casts his life-long love of theatre in the most touching terms:

There it was

Always

The nearest thing to a root

A base

From which I set out

And to which I returned

Does he ever regret having devoted so much energy to the stage? “Not at all,” he says at once. “I found a vocation and I discovered I could write plays. I’m absolutely sure it was the right way to spend my life.”

‘Straight Line Crazy’ runs at the Bridge Theatre, London SE1 (bridge theatre.co.uk; 0333 320 0051), from Monday to June 18