Don’t Worry, He’s Still Railing : Remember David Hare, angry leftist writer of provocative plays about Britain? : He’s still that, but now his works reveal a belief in democratic institutions. (Make that a grudging belief.)

How pleasant to sit in an office at the National Theatre, sipping at a glass of white wine and talking with David Hare, one of Britain’s foremost playwrights. Hare has an amiable, almost boyish charm; he talks with eloquence and wit, smiles easily and often, tells good anecdotes and lets slip delicious tidbits of gossip. It’s hard to imagine more civilized, friendly company.

The David Hare one reads about so frequently must be some other guy.

He has a reputation, you see, as a stormy, outspoken character. Hare has the ability to make waves when he makes public pronouncements; it happens repeatedly.

It was Hare who took the unique step of responding angrily and publicly to a negative 1989 review by the then-New York Times theater critic Frank Rich that hastened the closure on Broadway of his play “The Secret Rapture,” which originally opened in 1988 at the National. Wrote Rich of the Broadway production: “Mr. Hare, serving as his play’s director at the Barrymore, is his own worst enemy.” The memorable Variety headline about Hare’s angered response read: “Ruffled Hare Airs Rich Bitch.”

Again, it was Hare who went on BBC television in the early ‘90s and, in the context of a discussion about TV arts programming, noted that it was impossible to compare Keats with, say, Bob Dylan; Keats was beyond question a greater writer. The ensuing high art-low art debate--cultural relativism, as it became known--dominated Britain’s arts pages for several months afterward.

Hare is given to seething public condemnations of the Tory government, which has ruled Britain for 15 years; profile writers invariably refer to him as thin-skinned and cold.

So how come he’s so agreeable today? Is he on his best behavior, or something?

“Not at all,” Hare sighs. “It’s just that if I say something in public, a year’s discussion seems to follow. The extraordinary torrent of stuff that follows every time I say something about the state of society means there must be an absence of real discussion.

“I can see that what I say can be annoying to people. It rubs them up the wrong way. But it used not to be out of order to discuss ideas in public.”

What’s beyond doubt is that Hare writes impassioned, provocative plays about the state of Britain from a left-wing perspective. It was true of “Plenty,” the first of his works to hit Broadway, in 1983 (it was made into a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and John Gielgud).

It is equally true of his play “Racing Demon,” which has its American premiere, directed by Richard Eyre, as part of the UK/LA Festival 1994 on Wednesday at the James A. Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood (preview performances begin today).

Yet “Racing Demon” tackles what looks on the surface to be unlikely Hare material. It examines the plight of four Church of England vicars, ministering to a south London congregation assailed by poverty, unemployment and other social problems. The help these four men can offer their flock is limited. One might expect Hare to rail against an august body such as the Church of England, so inextricably is it tied up with Britain’s Establishment; yet the play invites sympathy with the vicars’ sometimes hapless attempts to help people in need.

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Hare did his homework assiduously and talked with Church of England clergymen, from higher-ranking deans and canons to lowly parish priests.

“When I went to see vicars in the inner city, they were doing social work, only on less than a social worker’s pay,” he recalled. “There was no mention of God whatsoever. God had been eliminated from the process, except as the person who empowered them to do this work. I think the play spoke for a huge cross section of society in Britain, namely people in the caring professions trying to bandage society’s wounds in a period of great social change.”

Now here is a more familiar David Hare, warming up to an anti-government diatribe: “The play speaks to people whose work is vocational, not entrepreneurial. The old, the sick, the dying, the poor--they all have to be looked after by some people. And in the 1980s in Britain, these people felt overlooked and ill-rewarded. The Thatcher government refused to take their problems seriously, refused to talk to anyone in the caring professions. They became a very bewildered group, and I suppose the play speaks to that bewilderment. They identified with that slightly helpless feeling.”

They identified in huge numbers. “Racing Demon,” which first opened at the National five years ago, has been one of the theater’s most popular productions in recent times, and has been revived into the repertory five times.

“The audience for it seems inexhaustible,” Hare agrees. “Many people have been to see it more than once, and it’s also played to people who aren’t the typical National Theatre audience.

“Basically, there aren’t any plays for the Christian audience these days. Christians have been alienated by theater in the last 20 or 30 years. Traditionally, of course, the theater was a religious place--Greek theater was about man’s relationship with the gods. But now Christians are turned off by what they regard as the secular, humanist, modern theater. So suddenly people are in to see ‘Racing Demon’ who have never been to the National before.”

Among these have been American visitors to London, who Hare says have enjoyed and appreciated “Racing Demon.” Yet, he adds, “there’s been no impetus for it to go to Broadway because people there fear it’s so English and the audiences will be puzzled. Of course, the same argument applied to ‘Plenty.’ It took four years to get to Broadway, and the moment it got there people didn’t know what the problem had been.

“With ‘Plenty,’ as with ‘Racing Demon,’ I’ve always argued the more English they are the better. There’s no point in trying to meet American audiences halfway, so we’re not changing any lines. After all, David Mamet and Sam Shepard play in London and people here don’t quite know where Arkansas is, but it doesn’t spoil their enjoyment.

“It’s been irritating to find so many Americans who like and understand the play and so many American theater owners frightened of it. It’s brave of Los Angeles to take it.”

Clergymen who saw “Racing Demon” have been broadly approving, and religious publications in Britain have praised the play. In part this may be because Hare has reclaimed the figure of the English vicar from low farce--clerics are often portrayed as fumbling, absent-minded figures with a tenuous grasp on the real world on the British stage.

“Vicars were a subject of satire,” Hare says. “I saw no point in saying how ridiculous they are. For one thing I didn’t feel it. I wanted to retrieve them theatrically.”

“Racing Demon” also dramatizes the sharp differences in attitudes toward ministry that currently exist within the Church of England. Its lead character, Lionel Espy, is a middle-aged man of decent, liberal views, clearly exhausted by the sheer weight of social problems he encounters in his parish; he has ceased to preach God’s word with any fervor. A younger vicar, Tony Ferris, is from the church’s evangelical wing and believes in inspiring parishioners with visions of hellfire and everlasting redemption. A third, Donald Bacon, is a man of no theology who finds simple happiness in humanity.

“Because the play’s about religion, it brought back to the theater a certain area that’s been neglected for a long time,” Hare adds. “Whatever materialism does or scientific advance appears to do, people are drawn to questions of life or death. While I was doing my research a dean said to me: ‘People will always gather where the transcendental is discussed.’ ”

“Racing Demon” is the first in a trilogy of Hare plays that examine the state of Britain. The second, “Murmuring Judges,” critically examines the British justice system, while the third, “The Absence of War,” looks at dilemmas facing the modern opposition Labor Party. The three plays ran as a trilogy at the National last fall.

W riting the three plays in succession, says Hare, made him examine his own attitudes. He had, after all, emerged in the 1970s with left-wing credentials as a playwright determined to tear down the British Establishment.

“The three plays made me believe in institutions,” he mused. “I want them to be good. I want the streets to be clean, the law just, the government wise. I’m not an anarchist.

“I don’t think institutions are silly anymore. I think people who work in them deserve a little respect from above. Yet we’ve lived through this extraordinary period in which our leaders have deliberately alienated themselves from people who work in institutions.”

Hare agrees he has thus traveled far in political terms, but adds a qualification: “In the 1960s, institutions existed to run an empire, a class system, to embody the fantasy that Britain was still a world power with universal gravitas. And Britain’s role in the world didn’t correspond to the seriousness with which the Establishment took itself.

“Now I feel we’re in the post-Thatcher ruins and we must get out of this together. I don’t believe all power is bad, or all politicians automatically suspect. I now think democratic institutions could work.”

His views were forged in unlikely circumstances. He was a pious prep-school boy from a suburban background; his father was a shipping-company purser. Interestingly, in view of his authorship of “Racing Demon,” Hare believed as a young man that every word in the Bible was true. At Lancing, an eminent Anglo-Catholic boarding school, he almost became a sacristan and did become head boy; his intellect propelled him into Cambridge, where he studied English literature and rebelled against his own privileged education.

He immediately became a playwright, forming a group called the Portable Theatre, which toured schools in a bus. He and his colleague, Howard Brenton, wrote “nasty, brutal little plays,” as Hare has since described them, to shake audiences out of their complacency. But by 1970 his first professional play, “Slag,” marked him as hugely promising, and his reputation has grown since. Apart from “Plenty,” Hare gained attention and a 1985 Evening Standard Drama Award for directing “Pravda,” about a tyrannical press baron clearly based on Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, for the National Theatre.

His hits have given Hare a certain celebrity cachet in Britain, as have his various relationships. He has three children from his marriage to TV producer Margaret Matheson, which was dissolved. Hare wrote four plays specifically for actress Kate Nelligan, which gave him an enduring reputation as someone who writes strong female roles. He lived for a spell with actress Blair Brown; she starred on Broadway in his “Secret Rapture,” and Hare’s associates believe that the fury of his response to Frank Rich was partly a defense of her.

N ow 47, he is married to inter national designer Nicole Far hi. Fittingly, Hare dresses with low-key elegance; he is handsome, with a shock of wavy brown hair and a face that, though now lined, betrays his days as an earnest schoolboy. Hare remains linked to a group of liberal intellectuals (Harold Pinter and Salman Rushdie are others) who despise the Tory government and are in turn targeted for scorn by the mostly conservative press.

He has also written screenplays (including Louis Malle’s 1992 “Damage”) and directed his own scripts (“Paris by Night,” “Strapless,” “Wetherby”). But his films, though he fiercely defends them, have suffered mixed notices--and he now admits that the stage is his most effective milieu.

“Theater is the most profound form of fictional writing,” he observed. “I’m impatient with novels. The complex things that happen when people pretend to be other people in front of other people--that is, the theater--don’t happen for me when I read a novel.

“The theater has been the cutting edge here for a while now. It’s made more profound by the way you’re made conscious of how other people are reacting to it as well as yourself. I’m in love with theater. When it works, it’s so exhilarating.”*

* “Racing Demon,” James A. Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Previews begin today; official opening is Wednesday. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 23. $15-$50. (213) 365-3500.