Breaking Baz: David Hare, British Playwright & Filmmaker, Casts An Unsparing Eye Over The UK General Election & Reveals He Is Working On A Drama About “The Great Question Of The 21st Century”

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EXCLUSIVE: David Hare, one of the UK’s foremost playwrights and a double Oscar nominee, is in an unsparing mood about the state of UK politics.

This comes as leaders of the country’s two major parties parry in the cut and thrust of the July 4 general election. Hare’s view, he tells Breaking Baz, is that there is in fact not enough cut and thrust, what with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak going to the polls “because he’s as fed up with this government as the rest of us.”  The dramatist, director,and screenwriter tells me that the Tories are coming up daily with “harebrained” election promises while Labour, its chief opponent, “is trying to be sober, say nothing and do nothing.” He fears, though, that Labour is taking up “a defensive crouch“ when it should be thrusting. “Something always goes disastrously wrong unless you are active and on the front foot in an election campaign.

And I hope the Labour Party will become a little more front foot,” he says. However, Hare appears chipper about Labour leader Keir Starmer’s prospects of becoming the next Prime Minister, following 14 years of the party being out of power. “And Starmer’s job, presumably, is to try and relate politics to people’s lives again, because I don’t at the moment feel that people think what’s going on in Westminster has much to do with them,” Hare argues.

Politics has always been woven into the fabric of Hare’s plays and screenplays, there’s quite the list of them. They include Pravda, the satire he wrote at the height of Thatcherism with Howard Brenton that he directed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage in 1985 starring Anthony Hopkins as fictional South African-born Lambert Le Roux, an omnivorous media tycoon.