David Hare

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 20:11

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a playwright and a theatre director. He made his name in the seventies as a writer of left wing intellectual drama. With continued success, however, polemic has given way to theatricality. Plays like Plenty, Pravda, and on television Lichten Hitler have brought him to the attention of a worldwide audience, while his position as an associate director at the National Theatre has given him a certain conventional respectability. He now feels, it seems, as often romantic as angry. A true man of the theatre, he is David Hare.

Presenter1:05

A man who was destined, David, I understand, to become an accountant. So, what went wrong, or indeed right?

David Hare1:10

Well, I was brought up in a small town in Sussex in Begshill-on-Sea. And when I was fifteen, I was indeed asked by a firm of chartered accountants if I'd be willing to join them. And I spent a great deal of time considering this, and maybe that's what I should have been.

Presenter1:24

Are you have you tired of the um the left-wing intellectual tag now that you've arrived at the medium age of forty-one?

David Hare1:32

No, not in the slightest. I I think that probably a characteristic of, if you like, my generation of writers is that we are unlikely to make that move to the right that previous um generations of writers have made. For some reason, I don't know, it was characteristic of writers of the fifties that they moved to the right for um personal reasons maybe. But I find, if anything, my politics have hardened over the years, and certainly ten years of uh Tory rule have done nothing to soften my feelings.

Presenter2:00

So the angry young man becomes the angry middle-aged man.

David Hare2:03

Well, I just write in a different way. I think that one of the things was that I got typed as a political writer, not because my plays were polemical or because they were propaganda, but because I just wanted plays to be about adult things. And one of the things that adults are interested in is politics, and there seemed no reason why the theatre should not include that. But at the time, the theatre was so cosy, it was so psychological, it was so about people's relationships that to bring politics into the theatre at all was thought to be to bring propaganda into the theatre, which is something I've never done.

Presenter2:39

We'll explore all that in a moment if we may, but let me just bring you on to the serious business of being.

Presenter2:45

Cast away,'cause it requires a great deal of imagination of which you are not short. How do you imagine the desert island to be?

David Hare2:50

Oh, I've got a very, very clear picture because I've spent twenty years listening to the programme. So I imagine myself totally content to be alone on this desert island, since as a writer it's absolutely no problem because that's the one thing a writer is very, very used to. And I'm going to write plays in the sand with my forefinger.

David Hare3:08

And then I'm going to direct the parrots, who will um perform these plays.

Presenter3:13

Shall we have your first piece of music?

David Hare3:15

Yes, we're going to have um the Bach double violin concerto. This is Isaac Stern's sixtieth birthday concert with its act Perlman, and um I've chosen it because it's one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

Presenter4:25

Itzak Perlman and Isaac Stern playing the opening of Bach's concerto in D minor for two violins at Isaac Stern's sixtieth birthday celebration with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta.

Presenter4:39

David Hare, were you always intent on being a playwright?

David Hare4:42

No, it came about by chance. What happened was that I was running a small theatre group. I thought I was going to be a theatre director. And I was travelling the country with something called Portable Theatre, which I started just after I left university. And we literally were without a play to do. A playwright had promised me a play, and he didn't deliver. And so in four days, I had to write one of my own. And so I knocked something together, a one-act play that took four days to write and lasted an hour. And it was handed by an agent that I instantly acquired to Michael Codron, who was and is now the most famous producer in the West End. And he then asked me to write a full-length play. So I found myself, without any intention at all, suddenly with a play on in the West End at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three.

Presenter5:30

But how did you know you could write? I mean, did you just think

David Hare5:32

I didn't. I just discovered that I had a facility for dialogue. I wouldn't say I could write plays. My first play, Slag, was very, very easy to write. Anything's easy to do once. And you can do it by instinct. Then you have to start learning the craft, and that's much more difficult.

Presenter5:47

But did it just flow? Does it still just flow?

David Hare5:50

No, it doesn't just flow. It's completely mysterious, and there's no way of talking about it that doesn't sound pretentious. And it gets people who don't write very irritated because they think, well, how can it be mystical in the way he talks about? But for me, it's like ectoplasm. I sit down, I haven't the slightest idea whether I'm going to be able to write or not. I write, and then at the end of the day, I look at it, and I have very little idea where it's come from, and I have very little idea who wrote it. Now, obviously, over the years, a great deal of craft has gone into it, so that I can then shape this ectoplasm into something that's acceptable to the public. But the impulse, the actual stuff,

David Hare6:31

I don't have a great deal of control over.

Presenter6:34

But if you have so little control over it or knowledge of where it comes from, you must be terrified it might suddenly disappear to morrow.

David Hare6:41

Absolutely. I d I don't know a writer who isn't terrified of that, and what's called writer's block is no more than that. It's just the fact that a writer accepts you cannot write by will. You can only write by impulse. And where that impulse comes from, I'm afraid, is mystical.

Presenter6:58

So you don't as you go about your daily business?

Presenter7:01

See some interchange between two people or meet an interesting character and think, ah, and store that up.

David Hare7:06

No, I I find that um your your imagination is more likely to be started up by some very small thing. I once met a woman for about three minutes and I was very impressed with some trousers she was wearing. They were grey silk trousers that I thought were very beautiful and I had a very fleeting impression of her. And then six months later I found her at the centre of a play I was writing. And when I'd written the play I was then asked, oh would you like to meet so-and-so, who was that person? And I said absolutely not. I've absolutely no interest in them as a real person. All I'm interested in them as the little trigger that fired me off.

Presenter7:49

Shall we have your next record?

David Hare7:51

Yes, Frank Sinatra said of Mabel Mercer that he'd learnt everything he knew about phrasing from her. I could choose any of the many songs she recorded Is It Always Like This, Blame It on My Youth, or He Was Too Good to Me, but we're going to have Young and Foolish.

Speaker 38:09

We wonder

Speaker 38:12

What we were dreaming of, smiling in the sunlight.

Speaker 38:20

Laughing in the rain

Speaker 38:25

I wish that we were young.

Speaker 38:32

And foolish.

Speaker 38:36

Okay.

Presenter8:38

Mabel Mercer singing Young and Foolish.

Presenter8:41

David, you were bred into a a very neat and tidy existence in Bexhill on Sea in in Sussex, hardly somewhere one would expect to produce a an outspoken radical.

David Hare8:53

No, I suppose it's uh surprising, but it was um a very quiet childhood and perhaps the fact that it's the town in England with the highest average age meant that um as time went on I became desperate for excitement and maybe the theatre was the place to go and get some excitement. If I tell you that the most exciting thing that happened in the first fifteen years of my life was that Marty Wilde came and gave one concert, I think you've got a picture of Bex Hill in the fifties.

Presenter9:19

What did your father do for a living?

David Hare9:21

He was a sailor for eleven months of the year he was away, and he would arrive once a year unloading goods from the world, bringing back um frozen lamb from New Zealand, or pineapple chunks from Hawaii, or um toys from Hong Kong. And so he was a very romantic figure in my life, because he simply came and disgorged goods over us, and then left again.

Presenter9:40

And your mother?

David Hare9:41

My mother brought us up, and it was very hard, as it is for sailors' wives, because um bringing up children alone is no joke.

Presenter9:48

and she taught accents at the local drawing school.

David Hare9:51

She talks Scottish accents at the local toddlers drama school. And I can remember her in the Delaware Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, playing a flunky in a production with Julie Christie as the ingenue. Julie now claims to have no memory of this. She denies it. But I can remember her very clearly and my mother opening doors for her on the stage.

Presenter10:11

And you had an accent at this time. You didn't speak as you speak now.

David Hare10:15

No, I acquired the accent I now have when I went to a school called Lansing, which was is a college in um an Anglo-Catholic college in um

David Hare10:24

Sussex and um I was mocked very early on by the boys for um not speaking the way they did. And so I learnt my present accent as camouflage.

Presenter10:32

How did you speak?

David Hare10:34

I spoke with a sort of off accent, which I got rid of because it was subject to so much mockery.

Presenter10:39

What is an off accent?

David Hare10:41

I couldn't quite say, but the current the accent I currently speak with I know was acceptable to the school. And I felt I was a scholarship boy, so I was being forced up, if you like, through the class system and through the educational system, both at once. That, if you like, is an experience that you'll find in the background of many writers. Class displacement is a recurring theme in English writing in the twentieth century.

Presenter11:06

and a desire to belong to a smarter class.

David Hare11:10

I don't think I ever had a desire to belong to it. I think having a little bit of um distance on a class is rather a good thing about writing it uh for writing about it. I've never shared the values of the English middle class, um and yet they've largely been my subject.

David Hare11:24

Shall we have your third record?

Presenter11:25

Yeah.

David Hare11:26

One of the nice things about the school was that um I had a wonderful housemaster who je who just recently died and he used to play music to us. Um we'd all sit in our pyjamas and dressing gowns. And I loved the Beethoven Lake Quartets, and we're going to have um the one in F.

Presenter12:42

The opening of Beethoven's String Quartet No. sixteen in F major, opus one hundred and thirty five, played by the Hollywood String Quartet.

Presenter12:51

I see, David, here, that um Judy Dench said that working with you as a director was like being directed by a nice cricketer.

David Hare12:59

Well, I certainly am not a great fan of adversarial directors. I I have a sort of basic gratitude to actors, namely that they do something that I would I would die rather than do. And I'm afraid this colours everything and makes me maybe excessively sentimental about actors. And because of that it's true I'm always on their side.

Presenter13:19

How did you get on at university? You were at at Jesus, Cambridge, English scholarship.

David Hare13:23

Scholarship. It was a slightly disappointing time for me, I think, because I'd recently, just before I went to university, I went to California. And so I just, for the first time in my life, met girls with cut-off jeans on surfboards and that exotic Pacific culture that I was rather in love with at the age of 17. And so the idea of spending three years at the coldest and dampest and most athletic university in the country didn't really appeal. And of course it was a time of great political turbulence as well. And so unfortunately my finals at university coincided with May 1968. So I was having to sit in a hot exam room where all my friends were on the barricades in Paris. And so I was getting the worst of all worlds at Cambridge.

Presenter14:07

So what did you do? What did you intend to do when you left university?

David Hare14:11

I don't think I had any very clear plan. I always wanted to work in the cinema, but at the time there was no British film industry. And although I got a sort of um I got a joke job with Pathé News, who asked me to make um four documentary films about sex and society, only using exclusively Pathé News and Pathé Pictorials. And so I combed through the archives and found absolutely no evidence of sex in Pathé News. And my desperation was such that the first film that I made was called Sex and Society, Episode One, The Duke of Windsor.

David Hare14:44

Because at least there was some decent footage of him.

Presenter14:46

But eventually you formed the portable theatre.

David Hare14:49

Yes, the Portable Theatre was really an angry, nasty group of people who wanted to go round the country and tell everyone in the country that it was in terminal decline. And so we presented a lot of extremely short, offensive plays in all sorts of places where the theatre didn't usually go, namely to village halls and schools and army camps, even prisons at times, because we wanted to make the theatre a much more immediate place.

Presenter15:18

But that doesn't sound like you, the sort of you you were describing, who um the nice cricketer of a director, going out being violent, aggressive, and thoroughly nasty.

David Hare15:27

I think all of us were extremely angry with Harold Wilson and with Wilson's government, and we felt that with him socialism had failed definitively. And I don't think any of us were naive enough to believe that there was going to be a revolution in England in the late sixties. But we did think that the country was on the verge of nervous breakdown, that its institutions were bankrupt, and that plainly none of us would dream of spending our lives in its institutions. And so we were waiting for civil violence.

Presenter15:56

Which never came.

David Hare15:59

Not yet.

Presenter16:01

Your fourth record.

David Hare16:02

The fourth record is um because we've got to um turn the volume up and generally shake the birds out of the trees and um uh bop. And so I've chosen um Jolie Blonde by Gary US Bonds.

Speaker 316:16

Scow!

Speaker 316:18

You're my darling

Speaker 316:19

You're my sunshine!

Speaker 316:22

You have all you

Speaker 316:25

And I promise to be true.

Speaker 316:30

In the shadow, I'll be waiting.

Speaker 316:34

By the river

Speaker 316:36

When I hear your sweet voice, I rejoice. I say my kisses for you.

Presenter16:44

Jolie Blonde, sung by Gary US Bonds. So David, the the play, the theatre, the stage you used as as a vehicle for your uh social or political comment, whether it was knuckle or teeth and smiles. Do you believe genuinely that the theatre, though, can have a real effect on society?

David Hare17:04

I don't know if it does have an effect, but I know that the illusion that it has an effect is absolutely essential to me. I wouldn't want to work in it unless I believed that it was possible. It doesn't really matter to me whether it's true or not. I'm very aware in America, if I present a play, that there is very little chance of my ideas having much effect, because the society is so strong that to be a member of the society you have to believe certain things. In England, the door of self-doubt is already open. I don't have to kick it open. People have a sense that they may or may not be living in the right way, and they're willing to listen to people who want to tell them of maybe another way to live. And I know from the letters that I get that certain things that I've written have had a very profound effect on individuals' lives. I get letters saying that people have left their jobs, or people have left their wives, or people have left their husbands, because of things that I've written.

Presenter18:03

Which happenings in which plays would cause someone to leave their job or whatever.

David Hare18:07

Obviously, the play that's had the most effect on individuals' lives is Plenty, because Plenty is a play about a woman who will not submit to the values of the society she lives in, as opposed to a man who is willing to accommodate the values of the society he lives in, because it dramatises that tension. It therefore, in people who are in any way in bad faith with their own accommodations, raises all sorts of questions. And so people after Plenty would write to me and say, seeing your play has made me realize that I'm living in a way which is basically dishonest. Now I do not write with that intention, and I also don't worry about that responsibility. It's something I've got used to, that because my plays, more or less since Knuckle, that's more or less for 15 years, have been about moral things, they've been about how to live, I accept the fact that there will always be a great swirl of controversy around these plays, that they will be attacked more vehemently than other people's plays, but that they will also have a profound effect on individuals.

Presenter19:14

Another echo.

David Hare19:15

Well now, this is um The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky.

David Hare19:19

I believe John Williams, who wrote the music for Jaws, had to pay some money to the Stravinsky Estate because the two pieces were so similar, and so I thought it would be absolutely perfect for Shark Watch.

Presenter20:29

The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, played by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Claudio Abardo.

Presenter20:36

Good shock watching music, as you say, David. We were talking about Plenty, which you wrote, what, eleven years ago now, which is about a a a brilliant young woman who's a a British agent in France during the war, who came to find little that could satisfy her in peacetime and drifted into a kind of madness. What made you take that as a theme?

David Hare20:55

Well, I was working on two things simultaneously, Licking Hitler, which was a television film about black propaganda in the Second World War. So I was reading a great deal about the Second World War. And I was very struck by a statistic that seventy-five percent of the women who were flown behind the lines in the SOE during the war were subsequently divorced. And it seemed to me that they had not been able in peace to find the same excitement that they'd found in war.

Presenter21:22

It's also though been said that the play was supposed to be symbolic of Britain's post-war decline, is that right?

David Hare21:28

I think that is certainly how it was seen in this country. However, when it was presented in New York, where it was even more successful than it had been in London, the Americans found parallels with their own experience in Vietnam.

David Hare21:42

Again, I'm not really answerable for that. Um I just write what I feel like writing, and I leave the interpretation of it to everybody else.

Presenter21:50

That was the the big hit, really, wasn't it? The first big hit, plenty. Yes.

David Hare21:54

Yes, it certainly uh it took almost four years of my life to do the version in London, the version in New York, and then the film.

David Hare22:02

And I then became I think my um terror of success started at this point, and um I became uh aware that it could easily take over my whole life.

David Hare22:14

And so in New York we took the extremely controversial decision of closing the play on Broadway when it was full. And we did this because I'd started writing the next thing. And when the producer rang me up and said, well, it's time for cast replacement. Will you fly over the Atlantic and put a new cast in? I said, I'm terribly sorry. I'm writing the next thing. And I want to continue doing that.

David Hare22:37

And he was not unnaturally quite angry, and said, Well, you can't possibly close a play when it's full. And I said, Well, why not? Let's let's knock it on the head.

David Hare22:45

And then when I drove into New York about six months later, and the play had indeed closed because I refused to go and redirect it.

David Hare22:52

I looked at the theatre and thought, How can I ever have been so stupid? and I felt a terrible sense of loss that my play wasn't on.

Presenter22:59

But why do you describe um the terror of success? Why do you describe it as terror?

David Hare23:05

I think because you um you watch so many writers fail to write after they've um written something successful and they spend the next five years um lolling about. And I've always um had a fear of stopping writing.

Presenter23:18

But you did stop writing, didn't you, after plenty, for about a year?

David Hare23:21

I did. I felt that I'd written enough about the subject of um the dec the decline of England and that plenty was the underlining and there was nothing more to say. I'd always made a a mental contract with the audience that I wouldn't write if I didn't have anything to say. Because I so hate evenings in the theatre where the writer is in bad faith or where he's not really got anything to say, I've um I've felt no, I'll stick to the contract, even if it means that my nerves go to pieces, which they did.

Presenter23:50

Sixth record, please.

David Hare23:51

Well, I think opera singers sing popular song extremely badly usually, and when they try and make the transition it's a disaster. But Theresa Stratus recently recorded some um Kurt Vial songs, and she's the rare example of an opera singer who can sing popular song. And in my view, she sings vial better than Lottie Lenia did.

Speaker 324:11

They say to me, Every morning You've only one life to lead So I've been dunning, let's let the sun in

Speaker 324:23

Who can jump in the ring?

Speaker 324:27

I used to be on the door draw.

Presenter24:29

Oh draw

Speaker 324:31

Let's be imaginary.

Speaker 324:35

Each day is not only the world with stamped

Speaker 324:39

With only one life.

Presenter24:41

Uh

Presenter24:42

Teresa Strata singing One Life to Live from Court Vaugh's Lady in the Dark with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, with New York City's Y Chamber Symphony, conducted by Gerard Schwartz.

Presenter24:53

David Hare, how much do the critics affect you? You get hurt.

David Hare24:59

Yes, I think that it's a great joke among my production team that I'm temperamentally completely unsuited to a life in the theatre. And they all giggle during dress rehearsals because there's always a moment at which I disappear from the auditorium in order to go and be sick in the men's room because the thought that I am actually going to stop everybody in their daily life and say, now hold on, everybody, for the next two hours, 800 people are actually going to have to listen to me. I have never managed to get up to a first night without it actually making me ill. And so obviously when critics write mean things, I just don't have the temperament that can cope with it.

Presenter25:44

Do they make you cry?

David Hare25:46

They have done in the past, but I think that uh I had a very happy experience with Plenty, where the critics certainly did make me cry. And then because Peter Hall was such a believer in the play, he kept it on at the National Theatre, where it played to very small houses because of the critical reception. And then it built its audience by word of mouth. And at the end, it was playing, after nine months, to standing ovations. And it was a success entirely created by the audience. And I think that for me was very liberating. And I thought, oh, I see, it doesn't actually matter what's said in the newspapers. What matters is what the audience thinks. And they can create their own successes.

Presenter26:23

You've had um many plays on at the National now. I mean, you you could be said to have become um an insider, a kind of resident mole, as it were, at the National, because it's a paradox, really, isn't it, that you are challenging the government or criticising the establishment on the nationalised stage.

David Hare26:42

Yes, I think that's a rather a good thing, though. That seems to me one of the healthier democratic traditions in this country, that the National Theatre is a stage from which you can attack the government. And certainly when Howard Brenton and I wrote Pravda together, then our idea was that we would attack Fleet Street for its supine attitude to the current government. And it was a joyous celebration of our freedom to do so. There aren't many countries in the world where you are free to do that. So for goodness' sake, let's go on using that freedom.

Presenter27:12

I wonder w what what your parents now think of this um natural dissident they gave birth to. Um are they proud of him, or do they sometimes

Presenter27:21

Find him rather an alien animal.

David Hare27:24

No, I wouldn't say they've found me alien at all. We're very, very close. But my mother's comment on my first play, which in many ways stands for everything that she feels about my work, was my first play was not just blue. I would say slag is deep vermilion. And after it my mother said, well, yes, I enjoyed it, but your father having been in the Navy understood rather more of it than I did.

David Hare27:46

And I think that would remain her attitude.

Presenter27:49

Shall we have another record?

David Hare27:50

Yes, the next is um Schoenberg's Transfigured Night, and this is from the days when he wrote Melody, not that awful um twelve tone that he went over to. A great friend of mine is Wallace Shawn, the American playwright, and in one of his plays The Leading Lady describes this music as if Schoenberg is putting his hands inside my blouse and running them all over my body.

Presenter29:14

Arnold Schoenberg's Sextet Transfigured Night, played by the La Salle Quartet with Donald McInnis and Jonathan Pegis on additional viola and cello.

Presenter29:25

David, Secret Rapture, your current play is backing them in at the National, as they say. That I'm told has I haven't seen it I'm told has an Edwina Currie as the uh leading villainess.

David Hare29:35

Yes, no, no, no. I don't think it's Edwina Curry at all. I've recently written two things about Tory politicians. One, a film called Paris by Night, which is coming out in May, with Charlotte Rampling playing a member of the European Parliament, and she's one of these new right Tory women. And also in The Secret Rapture, the older sister, played by Penelope Wilton, is one of the same breed. And I've recently become very interested in these women. And there are more of them than you know of. I think you're just naming the most famous.

Presenter30:06

Perhaps you should write, though, about the most famous one of them all, which is misses Thatcher. Nobody's written a play about it.

David Hare30:12

No, I think one of the oddest things is that although there have been a great many films and plays about the economic consequences of Thatcherism, so the um for instance the boys from the black stuff there's been very little about the psychology of her and the people around her. And both the film and the play are about those things. And I've been fortunate in having the field almost to myself, really from the starting point, that I couldn't understand why she was so angry, or why she is so angry all the time. It seems to me she has everything her own way. She's been in power for ten years. She has a hard right government, putting into practice hard right ideals. She's surrounded by yes men. Everything is going her way. Why is she in such a fearful temper all the time?

Presenter30:56

And do you think that you you might one day write a play directly about the final?

David Hare31:00

No, I can't imagine. She she doesn't seem to me, uh whatever the word is, theatrogenic. She's not somebody who uh inspires me to write.

Presenter31:08

All of which, David, is is a long, long way from the um the semi detached existence of Bexilon C. Are you here, do you think, because you were brought up?

Presenter31:19

in that kind of environment, in that kind of world, or in spite of it.

David Hare31:23

I know it's unfashionable to say this because I think I suppose if anything if if the twentieth if one belief marks the twentieth century, it is that everybody thinks that your childhood is what really marks you and what makes you who you are. I don't myself believe it. I think all I have is I discovered by accident that I had a gift for writing dialogue. And once I discovered I had that, most of what I've written about has come from the ether. I don't really believe that it's come from my childhood.

Presenter31:59

We must have your last record.

David Hare32:01

Well, I was lucky enough in 1987 to direct the first production of an opera called The Knife. It was half opera, half musical. And Mandy Potinkin, the great American lyric tenor, played a transsexual. He was a man in the first half of the musical, and he became a woman in the second half of the musical. And Jules Stein, the great Broadway composer, said of it, I don't even know if I like it, but I'm just glad somebody's done it at last. So there was finally an experiment with the form of the musical, which has been calcified for years and years and years. Unfortunately there's no cast recording of The Knife, so instead I have a piece from an LP that Mandy was making at the same time that he did The Knife, which was the LP of South Pacific, and here he sings Younger Than Springtime.

Speaker 332:54

Younger than springtime

Speaker 332:59

Softer than starlight

Speaker 333:02

Are you?

Speaker 333:04

Warmer than winds of June Are the gentle lips you gave me Gayer than laughter

Speaker 333:18

Are you sweeter than music?

Presenter33:23

Younger Than Springtime from Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, sung by Mandy Petinkin.

Presenter33:29

So, David, um, which record of all of those eight would you have to have with you?

David Hare33:35

Well, I'm very torn between uh Mabel Mercer and uh the Bach double violin concerto. I I think if you promise not to leave me on the island for too long, I'll have Mabel Mercer.

Presenter33:45

I I make no promises, I'm afraid. The book. You have, I'm quite sure you know, um the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. What else would you like?

David Hare33:54

Um well, I'm going to have uh La Rousse Gastronomique, which is the um um Bible of French cookery and indeed now, happily, of of international cookery. The latest edition is just uh describes every possible meal.

Presenter34:08

And the luxury.

David Hare34:10

The luxury item is rather complex. It's um going to be a piece of coconut matting.

David Hare34:15

and a a cricket bat and a bowling machine.

David Hare34:18

And I'm going to turn the bowling machine up day by day and learn day after day to play ever faster bowling.

David Hare34:26

So that when I return to England and go to the Lords Test match and um I'm sitting there and whoever in the England team has been uh caught with a barmaid or whatever the problem is, and they say is there anyone in the ground who can actually play West Indian fast bowling, I'm going to have not wasted my time on the desert island.

Presenter34:45

Wonderful. David Hare, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desertile indiscs.

David Hare34:49

Well, thank you.

Speaker 234:57

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.