29.01.2009

Playing the public and the personal

Mike Belbin sees David Hare going beyond haranguing the British for denying that ideas matter

David Hare may have succeeded George Bernard Shaw as Britain’s top leftwing dramatist. His latest play Gethsemane is getting good audiences at the National Theatre; his latest movie adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s novel The reader is out on release and marked for the Oscars; throughout January the BFI South Bank (previously the National Film Theatre) has been running a season of his TV films.

Why is he the writer that TV producers once wanted and theatre audiences still want to hear on the condition of Britain? If Bernard Shaw was, as Lenin quipped, “a good man fallen among Fabians”, is Hare a versatile pen who has fallen out with Fabians?

Sir David Hare, knighted in 1998, was, like most of us, a welfare state baby. His birth coincides with the Attlee Labour government, the setting up of the NHS and the expansion of state intervention, including state-subsidised theatre, that had begun in the war. Born in 1947, Hare spent much of his early life in Bexhill-on-Sea, son of a P&O sailor and a Scottish mother. He was a boarder at the Anglo-Catholic Lancing College and, after some time in California, went on to read English at Jesus College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, he met cultural theorist Raymond Williams, which nevertheless did not alter his decision to avoid becoming a literary critic. Graduating in 1968, Hare worked briefly for Pathé News before forming with Tony Bicat a small theatre company called Portable. Touring in a van, it performed plays in small halls, army camps and, on one occasion, a working men’s club. At one venue, the audience consisted entirely of Howard Brenton, a Cambridge compatriot of Hare’s, who went on to write for Portable.

At first, Hare was the group’s director, but later took to writing plays, going on to become in 1973 resident dramatist at the Royal Court, the theatre famous for the liberal ‘kitchen sink’ drama of Osborne and Wesker. In 1978, Hare wrote one of the first plays to be premiered at the new National Theatre and in the same year produced his first TV ‘single play’ for BBC1. His more recent work includes the play about rail privatisation, The permanent way; Stuff happens about the start of the Iraq invasion; and now Gethsemane, his third play about the Labour Party.

He has both directed films and written screenplays, the most recent of which is The reader featuring Kate Winslet. The current season of his TV films at the BFI contains, in my view and perhaps contrary to literary/theatrical opinion, his most interesting and moving works.

Like GBS before him, Hare made a decision to try to write drama that reached as many people as possible. His early work for Portable had been part of the group’s aesthetic: to sideline intimate ‘psychological’ drama and present “social situations in a process of extreme decay” (Hare). Like many young people in 1968, the Portables could only see decay all around them, with an establishment getting crueller by the minute, as orthodoxies were challenged in a time of recession.

The company’s style was aggressive and provocative. In a later interview, Hare commented: “We wanted to pick up the medium of theatre and shake it by the scruff of its neck.” In works by Portable and in workshop productions at the Court, Hare and co-writers made public statements through extremes of personal experience - small-scale spectacles about murder, pornography, council corruption and how counter-insurgency torture might produce more IRA recruits in England’s Ireland.

About 1974, Hare began to write much longer plays, including a collaboration with the company, Joint Stock, based on William Hinton’s book about Chinese communism, Fanshen. His Plenty was a large play about the post-war period up to and beyond the Suez debacle, premiered at the National Theatre. He worked for TV, directed and wrote movies and continued a steady stream of stage work, including his trilogy of works about British institutions under Thatcherism - Racing demon, Murmuring judges and Absence of war - the last about a Labour election campaign.

Hare has declared that he has always felt like an outsider, but lucky. He grew up, of course, in the ‘fortunate’ era. Welfare concessions, such as free university education and arts grants, soothed the unions, but also produced at least two generations of middle class satirists. While working class comics often got their start in the army and produced their own forms of irreverence (the Goons were full of insubordinate humour), the well-off universities came up with a dissident subculture. These satire boomers with their implicit demands for ‘fairness’ (meritocracy) and ‘dynamism’ struck out against a ‘stuffy’ ruling class. It was in the late 60s and 70s that this wave of posh but angry dissent peaked, with the exuberantly contemptuous Pythons followed by the increasingly pessimistic generation of Rowan Atkinson.

Hare himself realised that the ghetto of touring theatre groups, though exciting, was only reaching a small audience of declining interest and clout; if you were primarily interested in public statement, the major theatres, as well as film and TV, were the arena. His friend and sometime writing partner, Howard Brenton, reached the same conclusion. He had a play on at the National before Hare, though Hare directed it - Weapons of happiness, set in south London and eastern Europe. However, Hare’s style was the closer to that ‘humanist’ naturalist drama Portable had rejected, but which dominated TV and the mainstream stage, from Rattigan to mature Stoppard.

Hare was lucky in arriving at TV just as ‘single plays’ were leaving the studio and being put on film. His first telly screenplay Licking Hitler was part of a season of such celluloid ‘plays’ produced at BBC Pebble Hill in Birmingham.

Where does art come from?

If one theme runs through the work of Marx from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital, it is the practice of exposing fetishism - dispelling the notion that things have life. For example, the assumption that commodities were like magic idols, whose power of exchange-value resided in themselves and from which flowed market fluctuations, unemployment, etc (Capital Vol 1, chapter 1, section 4). Just so, mysterious entities called the Economy or Culture are not forces from something called ‘modernity’ or the insides of our brain; rather they are made by people in particular social relationships.

In ancient Rome, the way society and work were organised meant you could clearly spot who ruled. Those who made the decisions (mainly the Senate, with or without an emperor) were the same individuals, whether in the capacity of landowners, politicians or generals. Under capitalism, it is more complex - which means that the way events actually happen must be explored and may even have to be argued about. Studying the making of art is no different.

So, we will not be following an individualist biography, where authors give birth to art as cocoons produce butterflies; or a poststructuralist chaos, where writing emerges as fixed lengths of the language in texts. The critic Fredric Jameson in fact suggests three ‘horizons’ shaping the contexts of writing that the individual artist participates in when going to work.

In The political unconscious (1981), Jameson argues that literary works can be viewed in three embedded and connected ways: as a symbolic action (1), a fiction, which attempts to resolve a contradiction in a situation or the idea of a situation prevalent in a culture. This ‘imaginary’ enactment and resolution contributes to a clash of discourses, marked by class (2), within a common code, and is worked within an ‘ideology of form’ (3), like a genre, technology, etc from a particular historical society.

Take Milton’s Paradise lost. Why should anyone want to rewrite the fall of man, already available in the Bible?

The first lines of Milton’s 12-part epic poem states the subject:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden tree, whose mortal tast [sic]
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat …

Milton’s theme is the problem of evil: how could we be so unworthy as to be cast out of Eden? He is, of course, writing some time after the English Revolution of 1649 had been usurped by the return of a Stuart king. For perhaps the English did not deserve a holy revolution; conservatives are right: sin rules the world. If this is how we started (original sin), how can we hope for paradise on earth?

Milton answers this by displaying figures who may be called Adam, Eve and Satan, but might also be read as a puritan marriage and a royalist cavalier. As the serpent admires the woman in the garden, the poem is dramatising a question: is there hope, despite ‘original sin’, for the offspring of the first parents, for revolution? He is doing this within a particular conflicted discourse - English Protestantism, high church vs low church - and using, daringly, a particular ‘ideology of form’, the classic aristocratic one of the epic poem.

With his wide classical and biblical knowledge, Milton takes the military genre of epic and uses it to explore the good fight of defining and avoiding sin. He brings the plain Christian issue of unworthiness - how can we be both sinful and hopeful? - on to the grandest literary territory of the recently restored ruling class and makes a new thing under the sun: puritan republican epic.

How does this apply to Hare?

The inquiry is already half answered above. Hare proved, with his National stage plays and his TV films, that he could write drama that some producers and many audiences liked. It had the style of humanist naturalist drama (personal relations in rooms, if you like), but with public resonance. Some of his plays veer towards the Portable or ‘political theatre’ style of caricature and agitprop and some indeed approach the kind of ‘just psychological’ domestic drama that Portable wanted to surmount. But the best avoid both clichés.

Hare writes ‘personal’ plays, exploring private troubles that can be related to public crises. Like Milton, he uses the forms of today (plays in rooms; film and TV) to question liberal and left-liberal denial of how bad our situation is, engaging with, though not always escaping, the idea that the choice is Tory or Labour, self-interest or concern, the ‘revolution’ of 1945 or its ‘betrayal’.

Lies and belief

GBS’s message was that middle class audiences need to wise up, be less romantic, be more scientific and practical. He assisted the Fabian-influenced Labour movement, whose government finally came to power in 1945.

Almost all of Hare’s work is set post-1945; his subject is the lack of belief in anything - including the promises of state care, which that landslide government seemed to make. Conservatives must be honest and liberals brave - lies and self-deception betray the ‘revolution’ implied by the setting up of the NHS and other public benefits.

In his first screenplay for TV, Hare goes beyond the post-war promises of the Attlee government to the myth of the united home front itself. Licking Hitler is located in a country mansion taken over by military intelligence for the duration. To this place comes Anna Seaton (Kate Nelligan), a young woman from an upper-middle class family, who is proficient in German translation. She joins what we now call a psychological operations unit - ‘psyops’: dirty tricks or ‘black propaganda’. The unit composes letters and radio conversations to be transmitted to Germany and the eastern front. They are designed to smear and give false, damaging information about leading German citizens and question the German war effort.

Anna is to assist chief writer Archie MacLean, a young Bill Patterson as a working class Scottish journalist. The two begin a sexual relationship, initiated by Archie getting drunk and breaking her bedroom door down. Anna seems impressed by him, but also frightened and later seeking less brusque forms of affection.

She finally queries one of Archie’s ideas too, bringing it to the attention of a superior officer. It is a plan to promote the rumour that the blood transfusions of a German medical unit are actually infecting wounded soldiers with syphilis. She is sent away from the house after Archie complains that she made sexual advances to her. The officer who fires her is not interested in whether the accusations are true.

After the war, Anna works in advertising, goes through a brief marriage and research in the Labour Party and ends up in an isolated farmhouse in Wales. She decides, though, that Archie told the lie about her so that she at least would be free from the soul-destroying work of the unit. “What you sensed then,” she says in a voiceover, “has become blindingly clear to the rest of us: that, whereas we knew exactly what we were fighting against, none of us had the whisper of an idea as to what we were fighting for. Over the years I have been watching the steady impoverishment of the people’s ideals, their loss of faith, the lying, the daily corrosive national habit of lying …”

Through his love stories, Hare diagnoses a general attitude in Britain, where after the good war and the relinquishing of empire, nothing serious need be done, with self-congratulation alternating with ‘edgy’ satire and grumbling. His solution to the problem of why there is no socialism in Britain is not the diagnosis of wrong belief, but the proposition that there is a lack of belief, indeed lack of ‘fibre’.

Hare has always had a clear idea of the kind of artistic protest he does not want to make. “Why,” he wonders in a 1978 lecture, “the insulting insistence in so much political theatre that a few gimcrack mottoes of the left will sort the out deep problems of reaction in modern England?” Hare has even been known more recently to admire Tony Blair, for the strength of his belief rather than its content. Thatcherism on the other hand, he cannot stand - another mere betrayal of the social democratic promise.

In Licking Hitler, Anna, however, finds no strong belief herself: she even writes to Archie years later trying to take up their relationship. Other Hare characters go half-crazy (Plenty), go to prison willingly (Teeth and smiles) or grumble in private at compromise (the trilogy).

Open resolution

Heading home is a TV film Hare wrote and directed for BBC2’s Screen Two slot in 1990.

Like Licking Hitler it takes place around the period of 1945, but this time after the war. It concerns another young woman, Janetta Wheatland (Joely Richardson), who this time arrives at the BBC from the suburbs to interview a poet. Janetta in fact meets another writer, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), and begins a friendship with him and his friend, Beryl (Stella Gonet). Janetta does not return home and gets a job in a library. There she meets a young man, Ian (Gary Oldman), who buys and sells flats and houses at a quick profit. Janetta begins an affair with Leonard and later one on the side with Ian.

She is invited to involve herself in Ian’s business, collecting rents and attending an auction. She finds it all exhilarating, though she still questions its morality and its safety. There are bigger fish moving into the rack rent game, like Derek (a surly Michael Bryant), who buys up gold clubs and music halls too. He warns Ian off. Ian, Derek says, likes “agitation, all the running around”, whereas he, Derek, likes “quiet” and being “professional”. Leonard meanwhile leaves without notice and Janetta goes round to see Beryl and ask whether he knew about Ian.

Beryl is far from supportive. She accuses Janetta of making the discovery that she, the innocent younger one, held the power in the relationship with Leonard. Janetta protests that she loves Leonard and that anyway he had indicated that other sexual liaisons were fine. “And you believed him?” ripostes Beryl. “You have this habit,” she continues, “of believing what other people say … but you only do it when it suits you.”

Like Licking Hitler, Heading home mostly has a very measured pace. Not slow, however, as every line hits home. Pauses and facial expressions are significant, but the words, while not elaborate, aim to bite deep.

After seeing Beryl, Janetta returns to the flat she shares with Ian. He is not there, but his Polish sidekick, Juliusz, is. He has been beaten up badly by Derek’s men. He tells Janetta that Ian thinks highly of her. “No-one can refuse her. How do you say no to her? They think she is a really nice person and that is a thing we can use.”

It has been a day for Janetta to be confirmed in her loss of innocence. But unlike many of Hare’s disillusioned protagonists, this does not incapacitate her. In the next scene, she goes to meet Ian in a sunlit street. She tells him she has put Juliusz on a boat train back to Poland, for his own good. Ian guesses that it is Derek: “Don’t go after them …” Janetta admonishes him: “Slow up. The fun’s over.”

Ian will, of course, go after them, for his own satisfaction, but he knows he must let go of Janetta. He pretends it is because she really belongs with her ‘poet’ and “those types”. Janetta accepts that they must separate, but for one last afternoon together she takes him a quiet beach where she used to go with Leonard.

Welcome to the party

Perhaps it was writing for television in a time when there was that bit more leeway for a singular unsupervised vision. In Heading home, Hare has succeeded in creating a character, Janetta, who is neither defeatist nor hysterical, who finds that discovering that you have some power is not a prologue to abusing or denying it.

GBS wrote to make socialism appeal to the broadest possible audience: a social vision was presented as only common sense. He had concluded early on that the working class could not make a revolution alone - or indeed make a revolution. In this work at least, Hare, while not giving us sectarian slogans, goes beyond haranguing the British for denying that ideas matter.

Like a new, improved version of the revolutionary party - neither too broad nor over-programmed - Janetta for one is firm in her core values and open in debate.