The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  On our return, Margaret and I found the country in the grip of counter-revolution. This being England, when fanshen came, it came from the right. Some popular propaganda about the unions not collecting rubbish and leaving bodies unburied in the winter months had convinced a large section of the electorate that bracing self-punishment was now in order. In love with a worst-case scenario and always up for moral correction, the British public had decided that in Margaret Thatcher they saw the ideal instrument for the job. Just four weeks after we got back, the new prime minister, Britain’s first woman leader, was voted in on the back of a widespread panic which made no sense to us. Maurice Saatchi, the PR architect of her victory, went on to claim that ‘Time for a Change’ was the most powerful slogan in politics. But I never thought it as potent as ‘We Can’t Go On as We Are’. It’s true that the country had staggered for the last decade, reeling around, shedding identity, raggedly trying to work out its uncertain future. But, my God, staggering was a great deal preferable to what lay ahead. From the moment Thatcher assumed office on 4 May it was clear to anyone who had spent the last year abroad that whatever the disease was thought to be, the cure was going to be far worse. On the back of a blowhard theory called monetarism, a fifth of British industry was about to be destroyed. A group of jackass intellectuals would seize Downing Street, push their wild ideas and damn the consequences. Within ten years, anything which resembled a community would be under sustained ideological attack. Thanks to a successful policy of divide and rule, policemen confronting a picket line would feel free to taunt striking miners by waving their overtime slips at them. If the lowering of the cranes for Churchill’s funeral had been the most moving public image of my lifetime, this image of abject class treachery was by far and away the most shaming.

  In that fateful early summer of 1979, this latest development, the election of a hardline prime minister, looked like just one more twist in our continuing island story. Nothing had prepared us for quotations from St Francis on the steps of Downing Street – ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’ – being offered straight to camera as a ruling-class piss-take. The effrontery was new. But the change of tone did not alert me, or indeed anyone else I knew, to the first shudders of a hairpin reversal that would last for at least thirty-five years. Of all the things that might happen, we had least foreseen that capitalism might have the ability to renew itself from within, kicking up a gear by freeing up markets and tearing up workers’ rights. It had been ingrained in every aspect and in all the evidence of my upbringing that the gains made in the 1940s towards free education, free health and decent standards of welfare were permanent gains, lasting standards of improvement, the majority of the people finally imposing themselves on the minority. There was no other way in which history made sense. People had fought for exactly this and returned from war to secure it. Like so many socialists of my age, I had insufficiently appreciated the values of the welfare state because all I had been able to see were its shortcomings. Many of us in our nightmares had imagined violence, the seizure of the country at the end of a gun by plutocrats or the military. But for those of us who were committed to believing in the essential wisdom of electorates, the idea of the country agreeing to hand itself back to the laissez-faire barbarism of the years before the war was unimaginable. Aiming to encourage industry and hard work, Margaret Thatcher was shocked at the end, according to Michael Portillo at least, to discover that she had encouraged only selfishness. Even she was forced to accept that the effects of her philosophy were wildly at odds with its intentions. As one wise commentator put it, committed to making a country in her father’s image, she succeeded only in making it in her son’s. Up till now, for those of us born in 1947, the direction of travel, however erratic, had been towards social justice and equality. From this point on, it would be a retreat.

  There was a curious parallel in my private life. Margaret and I tried to settle, but at some level we both knew that there was never going to be any such thing as normal. It was gone. In New York we had lived in a community full of visitors, people coming and going all the time. The doors of the apartment were open and so were we. Life had felt temporary, provisional, shared. We were pinballs, knocked about each day by whoever we bumped into. Now we were back in England, we were facing reality. It was just us. At a certain point, it became clear to Margaret that I had been lying to her for over two years. I told her that Kate and I had indeed resumed our relationship some time previously, and that I had sustained the deception for a very long period. Since Margaret had openly invited Kate into our lives and liked her, the impact of the news was devastating. The fact that it was over counted for nothing. We reeled around for a few weeks with me spending most of my time in Birmingham preparing the film, even though most of its shooting would take place in London, some of it in the very flat I had lived in at Cambridge Circus. The grotesque appropriateness with which I had entitled the film Dreams of Leaving did nothing to palliate the injury I was doing to Margaret.

  Our marriage ended in miserable circumstances in Rye in Sussex, ten miles from where I had been born. We had gone to stay with Peter Jenkins and Polly Toynbee, two Guardian journalists who had invited our whole family for a weekend in their cottage. Polly and Margaret had recently become good friends. On the Saturday afternoon, we had gone to our room to have a rest while the children slept across the corridor. It was the most sustained time that Margaret and I had spent together since the discovery of my other life and the full extent of my deceit. From the first day we had met Margaret and I had felt immense esteem and unforced admiration for each other, as well as love. Now, Margaret said, in her eyes that esteem was gone. It would never return. In that case, I said, we would have to break up, since I was finding its loss unbearable. I would rather we lived apart than lived diminished. Margaret agreed.

  Having resolved to bring our marriage to an end after nine years, Margaret and I went down to dinner with Peter and Polly. Peter Jenkins, a man who at the best of times behaved as though Guardian columnist were an office of state, set off from the head of the table on a bumptious name-dropping monologue in which he was invariably the hero. Misguided prime ministers like Harold Wilson and Edward Heath featured for Peter only in so far as they were willing to listen respectfully to his advice and marvel at how much better it would have served them than what they had actually done. A politician’s purpose in life was to provide red wine-driven anecdotes for Peter’s nightly self-celebration. Bottle after bottle went down, Peter entirely insensitive to our unhappiness and far too deep in his own narrative to care. For me, his fluffy voice, whistling oblivious through archaic dentistry, was impossible to bear. On Sunday morning, after an entirely sleepless night, the Hare family left early. In the thirty-five years since that unendurable weekend, I admit I have never opened the Guardian and seen the words ‘Polly Toynbee’ without groaning. Her trademark censoriousness has always brought back memories of utter bleakness and despair. Of course any sane observer would say it was hardly Polly and Peter’s fault that our marriage ended in their house. But I am no sane observer.

  At the end of the weekend I made life far worse for Margaret by suggesting that perhaps we should not break up immediately. I had a film to make. Could we delay until it was in the can? Rightly, she told me to get out. The only excuse I can offer for my callousness is that in abandoning my wife and family, it occurred to me more than once that I was in danger of becoming my father. All my life I had felt myself hurt by a father who had been absent. Now, in my turn, I proposed to absent myself. Anyone determined to think ill of me would henceforth say, ‘He left his kids when two of them were six months old.’ The wife of a fellow playwright remarked, ‘Oh they’re allowed to leave now, are they?’ In artistic matters I had been free in my judgements. After all, there was art I liked and art I didn’t. But in matters of personal behaviour I had never presumed to judge others, nor had much wish to. As someone who had long been abstemious, I now went cold turkey. Since childhood, I had know
n that adults were at risk from feelings over which they had little control. Few people were able to do what they ought. They did what they could. To judge them for their personal lapses was to judge them for being human. I knew that I had always been drawn to Oscar Wilde as much for his philosophy as for his wit. It was Wilde who insisted that morality was never a matter of telling others how to behave. It was how you behaved yourself. Only the sinner was in a position to judge the sin. And in my case, my judgement on myself was far worse than anyone else’s could ever be.

  As it turned out, as my children grew up I grew close to them, far closer than my own father was to me, and did my best to take care of them. Our lives became so happily intertwined that I scarcely noticed how intimate our arrangements were. I took them for granted. So did everyone else. Margaret wanted me to be their father and so did I. When I watched Lewis, aged four, bounce off the fender of a slow-moving car on Brighton seafront, I thought my life was over. I came very close to losing my temper only once, as it happened, when we were making the film of Saigon in Bangkok. I had brought my three-year-old daughter to be with me during the shoot. It was sometimes inconvenient, and sometimes I had to lean on other people’s kindness when I had too much to do. One day, the whole cast and crew were gathered round the pool. I was watching Darcy in the water when another divorced father, beer in hand, asked me whether I wasn’t overcompensating. I asked him what he meant. ‘I mean, bringing your daughter all the way to Bangkok. Isn’t that too much the guilty husband?’ I had to hold down sudden white-hot anger. ‘Has it not occurred to you’, I said, ‘that I might have brought Darcy here because I adore her company?’

  I moved out as soon as I was told to, and went, like other strays before me, to lodge in the house of Caroline Younger. Caroline was the calm port in the storm, who, after the odd misfortune of her own, regarded those of others with practical good sense and kindness. I was quick to find out which of my friends identified with human suffering and which didn’t. There were welcome and unwelcome surprises. Anna Massey, Roger Dancey and Stephen Frears were unfailingly loyal and wise. In particular, I dreaded telling my mother what had happened, and when I did finally pluck up courage she reacted as I knew she would, at once sounding distraught but not altogether unready. I went on to say I knew, it was terrible, I was so worried for the family I was leaving. At this point Mum confounded me more than she had ever done in my life. She said, ‘You don’t understand. I’m not worried for them. I’m worried for you.’

  Meanwhile, I needed a leading man for my film, and Stephen Moore recommended to me a young actor he knew who had been doing great things at the Liverpool Everyman. I asked whether he could play a romantic lead. Stephen said he had never been required to so far, he was seen more as a character man, but he was a good-enough-looking chap, so why didn’t I meet him? Bill Nighy claims that on our first encounter I warned him that, while filming, I might occasionally turn white and be sick, and not to take it personally if it happened while he was acting. All I remember is the pretty fringe like a pelmet over Bill’s forehead and, already, the air of cheerful self-irony which was ten per cent reminiscent of the raffish actor Denholm Elliott and ninety per cent blindingly original. I thought he was perfect, and still do. In all I was to work with Kate five times. With Judi Dench, four. With Bill, so far, ten.

  In Teeth ’n’ Smiles, the manager Saraffian describes his singer Maggie as a minor cult. He adds, ‘I’d rather have leprosy than a minor cult.’ While we were filming Dreams of Leaving one of the crew who had worked on Licking Hitler said to me, ‘Why don’t you stick to those period things? You’re good at those.’ When the film went out, some people couldn’t see the point of it, while others were provoked. Tony Bicât’s sister Tina wrote me a cogent letter saying, effectively, ‘Yes of course, we all dream of leaving, so what? Most of us can’t.’ But the title itself caught on, and all too soon I knew by the film’s persistence in strangers’ conversation – ‘Are you the man who wrote Dreams of Leaving?’ – that I had a minor cult. When I went into bookshops, other writers always seemed to be using the title. Both the Human League and the Clientele released songs called ‘Dreams of Leaving’. Another group took the last lines of the film and made them into a song which rose briefly in the charts.

  Our lives dismay us

  We know no comfort

  We have dreams of leaving

  Everyone I know

  Soon, Margaret and I would begin new lives. But for now I had done the only thing I knew how. For better or worse, forgive me, I had gone back to work.

  Our Child Will Understand

  1979 represented a low point for our whole family. When I was once asked by an interviewer if I had suffered for my art, I said yes, a good deal, but not nearly as much as those around me. We all had to get going again from a standing start, and with no momentum. I went off to Linden Gardens in the dingier part of Notting Hill, where, by spending every penny I had, I secured a deposit for a mortgage on a gloomy flat with a leaking skylight and resolved to live alone. On the floor above worked a prostitute who came downstairs one night with a knife between her shoulder blades. A dispute with her pimp. After a year of almost zero productiveness I went off to Australia for three weeks, having agreed to write for the 1982 Adelaide Festival. I calculated that I would force myself to finish a new play. If I failed . . . well, Australia was a long way away. On the trip home, I stopped over with Joe, aged seven, in Mumbai for a week and I was handed my subject. Disgracefully, A Map of the World remains to this day one of only a handful of plays in the English-speaking repertory with a leading part for an Indian actor. Roshan Seth played Victor Mehta, first in Adelaide and Sydney, then in London and later in New York. Margaret meanwhile had found a new job as Head of Drama at Central Television, where she commissioned and oversaw some standout television including Made in Britain and Auf Wiedersehen Pet.

  Four years after it was written, Joe Papp gave way to the pressure of his friends and mounted Plenty, first off Broadway, and subsequently on, in a production stronger than the first. Papp said he only produced the play because he was so tired of people telling him to. He resented the fact that he had to go abroad to get the political writing he so badly wanted from American dramatists. Kate had by now acted on the feelings of misery England brought out in her and moved to New York to start over. Suddenly, with the Plymouth Theatre neon-lit by a sign reading ‘1983: The Year of Plenty’, both of us were enjoying a delirious kind of open-hearted acceptance, unknown in England. As Kate said to me, ‘Even you can’t pick a hole in this.’ A subsequent film starring Meryl Streep on shining form brought the story to a much larger audience. But it wasn’t until I went off to Brighton for four weeks in 1984 with Howard Brenton to write a play about a demented press magnate who is out to destroy everything in his sight that I began to feel some of my shattered confidence returning. One day, walking on the promenade and seeing Michael Heseltine a few feet away heading towards the Conservative Party conference, Howard remarked to me how easy it would be to take a pop at him. There was no visible security. Next day we woke to find the IRA had bombed the Grand Hotel. We rushed to the seafront to see its facade collapsed like a wedding cake. Margaret Thatcher’s behaviour that morning, as she organised clothes from Marks and Spencer for her shell-shocked colleagues, was exemplary. As Howard said, ‘She may be a terrible prime minister, but she’d make a great tank commander.’

  The production of Pravda was exhilarating, and for Howard and me it was our last collaboration. Thanks to a historic performance from Anthony Hopkins, we went out with a bang. The play’s subject matter – the undignified surrender of British journalists to Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell – ensured that the guerrilla skirmishes both Howard and I had frequently engaged in with our skewed dystopian press were transformed by our theatrical declaration of war into outright bloody conflict. But it was too late for the newspapers to do much damage. Somehow my series of conversations with Howard in Brighton had not just resulted in a play. They had
also cleared my head to unlock a steady flow of work. In less than ten years I would write The Bay at Nice, The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War and Skylight, all at an indecent speed which at one point would have been impossible.

  I was particularly influenced by a letter from Philip Roth, who became a good friend in the years he spent living in London. I would often join him for lunch and be amazed that one of America’s greatest novelists could be found eating most days in the Notting Hill branch of Spudulike.

  Saw Pravda last night. You are lucky to have Mr Hopkins and he is lucky indeed to have you. I remember when I told you about the right-wing ideologues on the West Bank you mentioned the excitement of writing about a monster. Well, it’s all there. Your excitement comes through in his incredible performance. I wish you’d write a play with only monsters. You are not a nice boy David and even if you persisting [sic] in pretending to be in Real Life, you should yield to the muses who know better than anyone, and stick to the wicked. I mean this and I’d be delighted to give you old Doc R’s prescription any time you want to have a meal . . . Anyway, congratulations for this. I like these monsters you create.