Wit & wisdom

Nonika Singh

Sir David Hare. Before you take his title seriously and expect long dreary monologues, let you be reminded that this celebrated playwright from UK has a remarkable sense of humour; call it cryptic, prickly or sardonic. Witty and bitingly funny asides marked his entire session at the 10th edition of Zee Jaipur Literature Festival.

It’s not just the ignorant critics, who know no better, or the pompous actors, who think they know best that he dares to take dig at. Rather he seems to be as comfortable putting himself in the line of fire as others. So talking of his tryst as a director that began with winning Golden Bear for Wetherby at the Berlin Film Festival, he admits that most directors’ journey is U-shaped.

“So I made a very good first film followed by bad ones.” Besides, his first love is writing plays and “in a lifetime you can be good at either.” Of course, even in writing you can’t always be excellent and setting up exemplary standards for oneself can be daunting. So on a normal day he admits to himself, “I am going to write rubbish then next day I find some gold in it and the process goes on.” But the process lasting seven days or a year, he tells you has nothing to do with the end result. Indeed, living in a world where everyone suffers from delusions of being a writer, he is peeved by movie actors all eager to change lines, directors who think nothing of screenplays and producers who tell you what to write on. So why would he, who by the way has two academy nominations to his credit, bother to write screenplays for this lot. Not that the theatre scene has remained unchanged.

From days when failure was a sign of being avant-garde, when lack of box-office success in theatre in England meant you were doing cutting-edge work, now he says, “We have moved to a phase where success is synonymous with quality.” Of course, in times such as these he remains a pioneer, essentially a political playwright who not merely reacts to situations but in a way foresees them or at least throws down the gauntlet.

Today the world might be having a near unanimous point of view on Iraq invasion he wrote “Stuff Happens”, which talks about the events that led to the 2003 Iraq invasion when none would have openly agreed to his views. Some of his plays have been about the 9/11 catastrophe, about the financial crisis, events which he calls earthquake of sorts, truly cataclysmic.

In comparison, coming up of Donald Trump as the US President, he only dismisses as an aftershock. And that’s why he wouldn’t care to write a play on him. Trump, he feels, can’t be satirized, for “he is not my idea of fun.” Clearly there are things that even Hare can’t laugh at. Besides now that everyone is writing on Trump why should he bother? The man who has given us strong female protagonists both in his plays and films like ‘The Hours’ starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, would rather be ahead of times, show the path rather than tread on the beaten track.

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