The most routine television programme will scroll up at the end to reveal the names of the guy who made the tea and

The most routine television programme will scroll up at the end to reveal the names of the guy who made the tea and the girl who sent the fax Films never forget to mention the focus- puller. There it stands in all its anonymous glory, day after day (in our case week after week), criticising governments, chastising politicians, and with luck illuminating those noisy caverns known as the great issues of the day. Critics and columnists might be irked by what he sees, but when future historians come to study the state of Britain in the late 20th century, Hare will be the playwright they turn to first.. AN EDITORIAL column in a newspaper is, when you come to think of it, a strange piece of work. When the New York Times critic Frank Rich gave an indifferent review of The Secret Rapture (condemning the play to an early Broadway demise), and in particular deprecated Brown’s performance in it, Hare wrote a furious open letter in response.Despite his brushes with the press, journalism attracts him, and Asking Around shows how much legwork he puts in researching his plays: where most writers stay behind their desks, Hare has been out there looking. A touching, troubadour-like protectiveness seems nearer the mark. He lived at various times with the actresses Kate Nelligan, Penny Downie and Blair Brown.

Unusual among post-war British playwrights in having written strong and independent roles for women, this has not prevented the charge of condescension and even misogyny. Despite the success of films such as Licking Hitler and Wetherby, Hare feels less secure in the cinema, and, fearing theatre to be imperilled, is more committed to the stage than he has ever been.Between his first marriage, to the television producer Margaret Matheson (with whom he had three children), and his second, to Nicole Farhi, his private life was not always easily separated from his work. Early on, no one was sure how to direct Hare – there were stumbling comparisons with Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Bertolt Brecht – and his own directing aspirations created difficulties: Peter Hall found him “naturally paranoid, nervous and edgy”.But the partnership with Eyre, director of Skylight, is well-established and trusting, and suggestions for occasional re-writing do not provoke Pinterish or Dennis Potterish spleen. Back then there were barricades to man, and he and Brenton had less time for talk of the sanctity of art.Richard Eyre, at Nottingham Playhouse, was one of those who recognised Hare’s talent. So, by 1978, did the National Theatre, which put on Plenty, his first major success. Hare is now the most-produced dramatist in the National’s history (Skylight is his 10th play to be staged there), an anti-establishment playwright who has found his natural home in state theatre. He’s sometimes described as having the air of a public schoolboy, but if so it’s in the Thirties mode of Auden and Isherwood (his left-wing politics arise partly from a distaste for the nannying effects of a public school education), and he admits to being a class fake who concealed, or over-compensated for his lower-middle-class origins by adopting a posh accent and dandyish manners.At Cambridge, he was taught by Raymond Williams, whose earnest socialism might at any other time have made him more appealing to Hare than he was.

But this was the mid-Sixties, anti-Vietnam war protests were in swing, and the world looked more exciting beyond the college gates. At 21, Hare founded the Portable Theatre Company, touring, writing and directing alternative agitprop plays with Tony Bicat and (later) Howard Brenton.These days he bridles at the word polemical: his characters may voice strong opinions, but he reserves the right to hold different ones and dislikes the pressure on writers to become the equivalent of Any Questions panellists. His mother was Scottish (she went to Paisley Grammar School, just like one of Hare’s detractors, Andrew Neil) and her commitment to education and self-improvement rubbed off on young David, who went to Lancing School, on a scholarship, at 11.His father was rarely at home: Hare likes to describe him as a sailor, for though he rose to be a purser with P&O, he began as a rebel and jackaroo, running off from Ilford for a life of adventure on the high seas.The remoteness and enigma of his father have had a huge effect on Hare, making him wary of surrogate father-figures and male mentors (his closest relationships have been with women), and also leaving him with unusually intense feelings towards his adopted institutional homes, Lancing and then Cambridge. He was born in Bexhill- on-Sea, in 1947, into a petit bourgeois, semi-detached, optimistic post- war world. Once he dissected the harm done by our cringing dependence on authority; now Hare has developed an interest in what it is to be good.The heroine of Skylight grows up being pushed by nannies beside stormy English seas, a background not unlike Hare’s own. Once, his enemies were lies and secrecy; now he explores how hard it is to be truthful.

Once he waged war on corrupt British institutions (the law, the church, the monarchy); now some of those institutions are being run by his contemporaries, and he’s more appreciative of the ordinary people in them – policemen, teachers, vicars, civil servants – struggling to hold things together. But he is happier in his personal life – marriage to the fashion designer Nicole Farhi has brought him more than dress sense – and middle age has made him more benign and understanding towards his characters. But in their great debate – is it better to love people, or love a person? – there’s no easy moral victory for either side.At 47, Hare has no less of a capacity for anger than he ever did. There’s a good example of this in Skylight, the new play, a comparatively intimate work by Hare’s standards, which dramatises the relationship between a successful Eighties businessman (played by Michael Gambon) and a woman teacher in the East End Each in turn delivers an angry denunciation of the other. Moral judgements are still passed – Hare is the most parsonical of our playwrights – but the judges are themselves judged in turn.

In recent plays, he has become more interested in paradox than dialectic – in how honourable intentions can produce disastrous results, and how all characters are contradictory and ambiguous. The early plays could be schematic and severe, the characters programmed to embody Marxist or feminist ideology rather than to be themselves, but rereading them now the dialogue seems funnier than it was given credit for. And beneath the affability, there’s a short fuse and a thick skin.Even as an allusion to his tone as a playwright, icy doesn’t seem to fit. With his bright blue eyes and Michael Holroyd-like charm, he looks, in person, younger than in photographs, dismayingly handsome in fact, and more good- humoured. There’s a touch of hauteur, a confidence in his own talents – but that, too, is understandable now that he’s regularly spoken of along with Pinter and Stoppard as one of the great post-war British playwrights. Yet he was nave in not anticipating how this would upset people – Patricia Hewitt, Philip Gould and others were furious at what they saw as a betrayal of privacy.Interviewers use the word icy about him, but it’s hard to see why. That it couldn’t two years ago was partly because the election was so fresh in everyone’s mind, but partly also because Hare had himself blurred the line between fact and invention by publishing his background research for the play in a book called Asking Around.He had been astute and steely in getting his material.