Keeping yourself angry, the Hare way: We Travelled, by David Hare, reviewed

A character in David Hare’s Skylight claims she has at last found contentment by no longer opening newspapers or watching television. ‘Well,’ says her astounded interlocutor, ‘you’re missing what’s happening. You’re missing reality.’

Hare himself can never be accused of missing (or missing out on) the reality of what is happening. He has already even mounted his response to ‘what it was like to experience Covid-19’ in Beat the Devil, starring Ralph Fiennes. His instinct has always been to tackle current affairs, sometimes with surreal consequences. When I saw Pravda, which was about Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen, the stalls were filled with Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen — art and life glowering at each other across the footlights.

It is Hare’s own purpose, as he says of the Pop artist Patrick Caulfield, to make sense of ‘the haunting unknowability of the environment in which human beings have to spend their lives’. Unlike Peter Morgan, who reduces prime ministers and other notabilities to figures in a national soap opera, Hare deepens the psychological mystery and allows us to imagine we can see into his characters’ minds — for example in Stuff Happens, which dealt with the diplomatic shenanigans preceding the invasion of Iraq, or The Power of Yes, a study of the reckless behaviour of bankers. Surely his sex-change saga, The Knife, is due for revival, as it was a little ahead of its time when produced in 1987.

In his plays, Hare has explored Britain’s complicity in torture and rendition. He has written about the power of the press, the traditions of the judiciary and the strange mix of jockeying and spirituality that is the Church of England. Always there is a breadth and a caustic wit reminiscent of his idol Chekhov, who likewise saw society as ‘rotten with money, drink and hypocrisy’.