David Hare on not being a nice boy, the irrelevance of critics, and bourgeois marmalade

Send us Fan MailThe legendary British playwright Sir David Hare is widely regarded as British theater’s most fervent chronicler of his country’s moral failings, to use the words of New York Times critic Bill Brantley. Of himself,  Hare has said, “It’s usually assumed that there are two groups of people in the world, those who obey the rules and those who disobey the rules, but in fact there’s a third group to which I belong: the people who don’t understand the rules.” Luckily for us, that misunderstanding, or curiosity, has been channeled into 39 plays over 50 years, as well as notable adaptations of other works, including screenplays for Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, for both of which he received Academy Award nominations. But Hare’s entry into playwriting was something of a happy accident, after a theater troupe he was working with, found itself in sudden need of a play. Hare jumped in, turning around a script in four days. That work, which explored the then-nascent feminist movement, exhibited a keen interest in strong female protagonists that has marked his career ever since. It makes sense, then, that one of his book choices for Shelf Life is Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women about the contribution of five female artists who did anything but play by the rules, as well as Wallace Shawn’s ominous short play, The Designated Mourner, dense with allusions to tyranny and complacency.