Interview: Playwright David Hare on Beat the Devil, His New Audio Play About Surviving Covid

In March 2020, the playwright David Hare became one of the first individuals in the United Kingdom to contract Covid-19. Although Hare miraculously survived, his condition was far more severe than many realized.

Hare transformed his harrowing experience into a three-minute monologue for the BBC, which garnered an extraordinary response. Among the listeners was director Nick Hytner, Hare’s long-time collaborator, who commissioned him to expand the monologue into a full-length piece.

“Beat the Devil,” a tale of Covid and righteous rage, marked the reopening of Hytner’s Bridge Theatre in London, with Ralph Fiennes portraying David Hare. A filmed version was also created, debuting after the London run concluded.

Recently, Audible Theater invited Hare to record his monologue as an audio play, a new venture for the playwright. Hare embraced the opportunity wholeheartedly, and the result is a performance brimming with palpable emotion. These are his reflections on the experience.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’re no stranger to the monologue form, but what about recording them for audio?
I know nothing about audio. In the studio next door to where I was doing mine, there was a guy who had six different tracks going with music on this and voices on that. It’s incredibly complex and sophisticated, with the most unbelievably skilled people. Audible really has it down, and they’ve found an enormous public for plays that people listen to while they’re doing all sorts of things.

So it was just you alone in the studio reading it?
It was just me in the studio performing it, not reading it. Meaning, I tried to perform it. I did two takes, having done one which I felt was not satisfactory, and then there were like 10 lines to patch. But by and large, I know it so well that in my head, once I got going, I don’t have any problems. It was interesting to say “pulmonary embolism.” Ralph Fiennes, who’s an experienced actor, has no problem saying “pulmonary embolism.” It’s hard.

It was interesting to relive the early days of Covid through your eyes.
It touched a lot of people because they remembered how little anybody knew. And at the beginning, the symptoms were alarming. As I describe, they were not symptoms that were making any sense to doctors. The hospitals were really treating it wrong. I’d had an instinct that I shouldn’t go into hospital because I’d been reading the papers and I didn’t think they knew what they were doing in hospitals. When I spoke to a professor of hematology months later while I was writing the play, she said to me “God, you were right. You were so much safer at home.” The virus wasn’t behaving like any other virus they knew. That sense of nature and revolt and everything being sudden, unexpected chaos, that’s what I tried to get into the monologue.

You describe your reaction to the British government’s action and inaction as “Survivor’s Rage.”
If there’s one running theme in my work, it’s that we’re here to suffer and life is tragic and we’re going to die. But there is necessary suffering and there is unnecessary suffering, and where and how do we draw a line between necessary and unnecessary suffering? In Britain, I felt very strongly that a whole lot of people were suffering who didn’t need to be suffering, because of the sheer incompetence and arrogance and laziness of the government. A whole lot of people died who didn’t need to die, and that made me very, very angry, and makes me angry to this day.

It was particularly odious to me that Boris Johnson claimed that his survival from Covid was because he had such a strong fighting character. I don’t regard my character as having much to do with my survival; I think it was good luck. I was extremely well looked after by my GP. I did various sensible things that, in retrospect, seemed to be right, but it was a tossup. I don’t think my character came into it.

The play was performed, and the film was made, before what we call Partygate. It became clear through all this time that Downing Street were ignoring the rules that they themselves were making. They had installed a wine fridge in the secretary’s office outside Johnson’s and they had what they called Wine Fridays, during which they all sat around and broke all the rules they were legislating. We’re going to tell you how to live, but we’re not going to do that ourselves.

It obviously finished Boris Johnson as a politician. I hesitate to say this since you have Trump back again, but the reason we will never have Johnson back again is because it was just such a breach of faith. Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the Conservative Party, the first thing she said when asked about what had gone wrong was that the whole Partygate thing was overblown.  Needless to say, all the bereaved and the people who’ve lost relatives were absolutely furious with her for saying such an incredibly insensitive thing. Of course it’s offensive to party when British citizens are dying under your regulations. Partygate is the great scandal of Covid.

I have to tell you, I think of two things whenever I drive on the Cross Bronx Expressway and my car goes bouncing through potholes: The Power Broker by Robert Caro and your play Straight Line Crazy. I take great pleasure in cursing Robert Moses’s name.
It is that unbelievable fact that if, in New York State, you drive on anything called an “Expressway,” it was built by Robert Moses, and I have no doubt that you’re right to curse it. But having said that, I’m not saying that I make the case for him, because I don’t, but I didn’t entirely believe that he was a total villain. I think he believed in what he was doing and then he lost sight of his idealism. The method that he chose, as he would say, to liberate people from the tenements, ceased to be the right solution to the problem over the years, and he couldn’t see that times had changed.

Did Robert Caro ever come to see the play when it was in New York?
No. I don’t think he wanted to. He’s got enough work on his hands. He’s got to finish his Lyndon Johnson biography. But I met people, like the guy who now has Robert Moses’s job. So many people called “City Planners” buy theater tickets. Every night, there were people called “City Planners,” and they were a fantastic audience.

Do people consider you an expert now on the Israel/Palestine conflict based on your play Via Dolorosa?
Yeah.

Do you consider yourself an expert on it?
Well, I know more than Joe Biden does, because I’ve been there. I’ve spent time in Gaza. But when I am asked to opine on this subject, as I have been continuously in the last year, I just say send money. One of the things you learn pretty quickly is that, inside the region, they have an incredibly complex and sophisticated understanding of the situation, and the people of Gaza and the people of Israel really don’t need to know what David Hare is thinking, but oh, my God, they need David Hare’s money. So, I just beg people to send money to the region to help, because it’s a humanitarian catastrophe. Every time I’m asked to say something, I say “I’m going to put down the phone and send a check,” because that, to me, is the most useful thing a citizen thousands of miles away can do at the moment.

You wrote a piece for The Spectator that had the headline “Musicals are Killing Theatre.” Do you still believe that?
It’s a completely mischievous piece of misreporting. What I actually said is that musicals are crowding out the West End, and therefore, it is very difficult for straight plays. Theaters which used to be given over to straight plays are being given to musicals. There’s a sort of mass funk at the moment, at least in the British theater, which is, get hold of a movie and make a play or musical out of it, but the original play in a commercial theater is a very rare breed indeed now, and I think that’s terribly sad. I don’t ask for the British theater to be exclusively straight plays or new plays, but I do ask for there to be some range of work. The range, unfortunately, after Covid, has got narrower and narrower.