COLUMNISTS 
It is lunchtime on Tuesday, September 15, the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, and the playwright David Hare is waiting for me in a café-cum-lifestyle store in Notting Hill, west London. The place bustles with the well-groomed wives of financiers, and is owned by Hare’s own well-groomed wife, the French-born designer Nicole Farhi.
Hare is at a side table, a slight man in grey jumper, soft leather jacket and blue shirt. It is the low-key clothing of one who prefers to observe from the edges, and as tasteful as one might expect of a fashion designer’s husband. The only discordant note is a slightly long, 1970s-style haircut.
Hare, 62, doesn’t enjoy media attention but is having lunch with the Financial Times to promote his new play The Power of Yes. Subtitled “a dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis”, it has its first preview on Tuesday at London’s Royal National Theatre. Nothing more about the play, or its storyline, is being made public. Officially, this is because Hare is still writing the drama. Indeed, as I approach our table, I see he is scribbling into a black leather notebook.
I navigate my way to the table, introduce myself and sit down. So, I ask, is it true that he is still writing this play? He stuffs the black book into a scruffy red canvas bag, looking defensive. “Yes. We haven’t finished yet,” he mutters, as a waiter appears with a glass of orange juice for him, and I order sparkling water. “I am trying to persuade the National Theatre to do something that is not pre-cooked but open-ended, that goes right to the wire. But that is easier to do with fringe theatre, not a big theatre. We had to audition a cast, but warn them their part might end up being chopped right down.”
Hare started his career as a co-founder of the radical Portable Theatre in 1968, and by the 1980s his sometimes scathing plays and films were famous. This produced a measure of financial security, cemented when he married Farhi, his second wife, in 1992. And in 1998 he was given a knighthood, that badge of establishment belonging and success.
In the years since then, however, Hare has continued to write plays that criticise the ideologies of the establishment, particularly those that betray leftwing ideals. Recent examples include Stuff Happens (2004, on the run-up to the Iraq war), The Permanent Way (2004, on the folly of rail privatisation) and last year’s National Theatre sell-out Gethsemane (on the failings of New Labour).
Rummaging in my bag, I discover that I have committed the most basic journalistic mistake: forgetting to bring a notebook. So I take shorthand notes on bits of paper – fittingly, given the topic of Hare’s new play, they are documents from a City of London conference about banking risk, which I had attended before this lunch.
The financial crisis has attracted many writers as a topic but as I know from my own experience of writing Fool’s Gold, it is difficult to make the story compelling. To make the tales more human, many of us have related the banking disaster through the eyes of a specific group of people (my book involved some former JPMorgan Chase bankers). I ask Hare if he is using the same technique.
Rather than answer, he sidesteps into a discussion about sexism in the City. “We have a cast of 20, with only two women, but that is probably about right. It’s shocking how few women there are in finance. I asked Victor Blank [the former chairman of Lloyds] why there were so few women; Blank said that when he started in banking there were barely any Jews either, but that has changed. Perhaps it’s a matter of time. But what do you think?”
I suggest that it partly reflects prejudice; there tend to be more women in newer areas of finance, such as derivatives. But the other big problem is that banking hours are hard to combine with babies. He listens intently to my answer. I wonder whether he is using me for research.
I have spent my career observing and interviewing others, first as an anthropologist and now as a journalist, and Hare’s conversational style feels disconcertingly familiar. Like an anthropologist, he seems more comfortable asking questions, observing the “other”, and then trying spin that into a story, rather than featuring in someone else’s version of events.
A waiter flourishes a menu. Hare chooses scrambled eggs and mushrooms; I select a salad of beetroot, artichoke and lentils. Lunch ordered, I ask whether he enjoyed talking with bankers such as Blank; was finance as easy to penetrate as the other “tribes” he has studied? Apparently not.
“This has probably been the least satisfying job, and the most irritating project [of my career] – I hated it,” he says, smiling engagingly. “Now, I have got to a point where I can understand a bit ... where I can read the FT and understand it.
“But I am still not sure that I really understand the details of finance. There again, does anyone ever really need to know how a CDO squared works?” I laugh. Hare has read my book, which covers the history of the “CDO squared”, a complex financial instrument involving bundles of debt.
He has, he says, read “around 40 or 50” books and talked to dozens of financiers while researching this play. “It’s a very strange world,” he continues. “I have never seen such an introverted group of people. When I was going round talking to bankers, I would get all these people saying things like, “I cannot talk about Goldman Sachs on the record.” And I would think to myself: “What are you scared of? What would Goldman Sachs do?” I mean, I have talked with Palestinians who were living in a situation that was a matter of life and death. But Goldman Sachs?”
I ask if he had much contact with bankers before. It seems not. Born in Bexhill, Sussex, in 1947, he had a middle-class but not particularly privileged background: his father, a merchant navy officer, was largely absent, and he escaped to Lancing College, a public school, via a scholarship and then to Cambridge, where he became caught up in the febrile, left-wing, revolutionary mood of the late 1960s.
“If you grow up in a place that is really boring, like Bexhill, then the rest of the world seems very glamorous and exciting. My friend Ian McEwan has sometimes asked me if I don’t find life boring – because he does, I sense. I always say, “No!” I sometimes find myself boring, and life depressing, but I never, ever find life boring. I just love getting out and looking at all these different areas and different tribes.”
A plate of scrambled eggs is placed before him, but he barely notices. Perhaps, I suggest, familiarity with the menu in his wife’s restaurant has taken the edge off his appetite? “When Nic [my wife] created her first restaurant, we had all these tasting evenings. But with this place, we now realise we cannot change the menu. People know what they like and expect it.” Being married to an entrepreneur has exposed him to commerce and fuelled his interest in turning business into literature, he adds.
Why, I ask, did he write this play? “I didn’t really want to, to be honest,” he admits, blue eyes twinkling. “A few years ago, after the Iraq war, Nick Hytner [director of the National Theatre], came to me and said we cannot call ourselves a ‘national’ theatre if we don’t tackle national issues and asked me to write a play. I did that, because I had a subtext already worked out. Then, when the financial crisis came, Nick came to me again. But I really wasn’t keen – I’d already written three plays about New Labour, and thought that is enough! And initially it wasn’t clear to me how to do it, how to find the metaphor ... ”
What is the metaphor? What is it about? “I won’t tell you,” he replies. The secrecy is down to bitter experience. When he wrote his plays about the Iraq war and about New Labour, the leaked details, true or not, became front-page news, he says. “Once an idea gets into the public mind, you can never get it out again – the internet has made all that worse.”
Softening, he adds: “This play is not about banker bashing – it is about the culture of banking, the stuff you write about.” He has dispatched his eggs efficiently; I scramble to finish my lentils, between jotting shorthand. I ask him if he thinks this culture is changing at all.
“I think the fundamentalist ideas about the free markets have been pretty discredited. For the past few years, there has been this idea that if two people make a deal in their self-interest and somebody got burnt, then it didn’t matter because it was their own stupid mistake – caveat emptor.
“But we now know that damage from that does not just affect two people but lots of other people too. In my eyes [the banking crisis] is not the intellectual equivalent of the Berlin Wall – this is not the moment that pure market capitalism falls; it is nearer Hungary in 1956. After that, there were still some people who went on being pro-Soviet communists but it looked incredibly stupid. In the same way, you still get some people, like James Murdoch [upholding free market dogmas], but they sound like old Stalinists. We are at an intellectual fork in the road.”
Hare is not optimistic that intellectual change will create a real revolution. “We have a situation now where the financial sector is basically blackmailing us all, saying that there cannot be a recovery unless you treat us well. It’s like what the miners did in Britain. But this time the trade union is in Canary Wharf.”
A waiter clears the plates, and presents the dessert menu. Hare chooses chocolate ice cream (“just one scoop”); I select summer pudding. A few minutes later, puddings arrive. “What’s that?” Hare asks suspiciously, staring at the dark red mass on my plate; perhaps he does not know the menu as well as he thinks.
“The real problem today is how to reconnect the interests of bankers with the rest of society, and that has to be done by regulators, as the expression of government,” Hare continues. “But do we see anyone willing to take on that challenge? No! That’s partly because there is now a bigger political crisis in Britain. Everyone believes that everyone else is a tribe, just out to further their own interests and line their pockets – politicians, bankers, you name it.”
Then there is the problem that few people understand finance. “New Labour have spent the past decade worrying about how to spend the country’s money, not looking at where it actually came from! Do you know a single person in the cabinet who seems to really understand all this?” I suggest that his play might help to counter this ignorance, but Hare makes a face – what seems to have stuck with him from this experience is that he cannot understand, let alone empathise with, the bankers’ motives.
When he spent time researching the Church of England for his play Racing Demon (1990), Hare eventually came to respect parts of the clergy. “[But with bankers] the problem is that all they seem to care about is money, and that is something I don’t quite get. It’s not even as if they do something interesting with the money! Back in the 1980s, you had people snorting cocaine, or whatever. But now? Take Hank Paulson [the ex-head of Goldman Sachs] – I read the other day that he lives on a family farm on Idaho. Why does anyone needs $500m, or whatever he got from Goldman, to live in Idaho!”
Two double espresso coffees arrive, and are quickly drunk. I ask about his next project. There is a major screenplay to finish, he says. But first there is The Power of Yes. He grabs his red canvas bag and together we head out into the street.
Later, back at the conference, I bump into Howard Davies, former head of the City regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), who now chairs the London School of Economics. I tell him about having lunch with Hare, and Davies says he has just learnt that “an actor friend of a friend is playing the part of me! But I don’t have a clue what is in it. Do you know?” he asks anxiously. I shake my head. Hare, the great player, has temporarily out-smarted the City – at least in terms of sowing financial fog.
David Hare’s ‘The Power of Yes’ previews at the National Theatre from 29 September. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Gillian Tett is an assistant editor of the FT and author of ‘Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe ’ (Little, Brown £18.99)
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202
202 Westbourne Grove, London W11
Orange juice
Sparkling water
Scrambled eggs and mushroom
Beetroot, lentil and artichoke salad
Chocolate ice cream
Summer pudding
Espresso coffee x2
Total (including service) £49.50
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When ‘the nation’s watchdog’ takes the stage
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| Blair and Bush in ‘Stuff Happens’ |
His plays are at their best when he combines his shrewd analytical skills with strong character-driven context. His early 1990s state-of-the-nation trilogy – Racing Demon (1990), taking on the Church of England; Murmuring Judges (1991), which examined the British legal system, and The Absence of War (1993), scrutinising the Labour party – proved a highlight in the National Theatre’s history, with Hare pulling off the tricky job of making ideas exciting and palpable.
Much of his work explores the interaction between public and private life. In Plenty (1978), he charted the mental disintegration of a former resistance worker disillusioned by postwar Britain. Skylight (1995) examined pragmatism versus idealism through an affair between a wealthy restaurateur and a teacher in a deprived state school. More recently, The Vertical Hour (2006) built up to a firecracker confrontation between two equally impassioned, articulate people over the question of when and where military intervention is justified.
Richard Eyre, former artistic director of the National Theatre, has described Hare as a romantic, driven by a belief that life can be improved. This makes him a fierce critic of hypocrisy and of those who betray their ideals. His disillusionment with New Labour has brought an edge of bitterness to some recent works. Gethsemane (2008) took on political party funding, but its reach was far wider, lamenting the loss of idealism and purpose not just on the left, but in politics as a whole.
Sometimes his characters turn into mouthpieces or he seems to fight too many issues at once. But he has a forensic skill and an outstanding ability to craft an argument. He also heads fearlessly into the biggest issues of the day. His verbatim drama on the privatisation of the railways, The Permanent Way (2004), touched a chord, while that same year Stuff Happens, on the build-up to the Iraq war, was packed nightly when it opened at the National Theatre with audiences keen for questions and answers. Now it is the turn of the financial world.
Sarah Hemming is a theatre critic for the FT
