Why?
His new play The Breath of Life, currently in preview, opens next week at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, starring the two great theatrical Dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, on stage together for the first time. Booming ticket sales -- more than 50 per cent sold before the first night -- prove that home-grown talent still beats Hollywood glamour in a battered West End market.
Another searing dissection of contemporary British institutions and mores?
Not exactly. Hare has moved away from parochial British affairs of state and ideology towards human crises of addiction and exploitation. The Breath of Life , he says, is about "generational change, and the way both men and women go into their sixties not feeling like old people any more". Dame Maggie plays a retired curator and Dame Judi a novelist who, on meeting for only the second time in their lives, find that both have had an affair with the same man.
Less theatrical Viagra than theatrical Ovaltine, perhaps?
One could hardly accuse Dench and Smith of failing to light up a theatre. Actresses have always loved Hare's meaty roles. Cate Blanchett, who starred in the 1999 revival of his 1978 play Plenty, didn't meet him until after the opening, but later gushed: "I felt as if I'd delved into the very centre of him. It was like having passionate, anonymous sex with someone and then later seeing their face."
And Lady Hare said . .
That would be top French fashion designer Nicole Farhi. Her reaction goes unrecorded. Sir David, however -- who is five years off his own 60th birthday -- has often described the startling effect that Farhi has had on his life. The beginning of their relationship in 1991 appeared to kick off a decade of great creativity for him. The Nineties closed with four Hare plays on Broadway in the same year.
Best known for . . .
Pravda (1985); the trilogy on Church, law and politics Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War (1993); Via Dolorosa (1998).
This article appeared in Times (UK) Online on October 9, 2002. 2002.