Brexit: politicians let us down

Playwright, screenwriter and theatre and film director Sir David Hare was one of the most distinguished names to have attended this year's Zee Jaipur Literature Festival. What distinguishes him from his peers is his unwavering focus on human beings and his incisive criticism of British institutions, finds out Pratik Ghosh as he speaks to screenplay writer of The Hours and The Reader. Excerpts:

You are a post-World War II child. Tell us something about that era.

I was born in 1947 on the day the Marshal Plan was announced. It was an incredibly enlightened thing whereby the Americans put in huge amounts of money for post-war European reconstruction. Paradoxically, considering what America has now become, I am a child of American enlightenment. The US decided that money had to be spent so that Britain and Germany could recover from the ravages of the war. I look back to the day when America, in that sense, had a benign influence in the world.

You have been a critique of British mores and the country's institutions. So what has had the most devastating impact on British society in recent times?

I think the 2008 financial crash. What we are seeing at the moment, the Brexit movement, is because of a profound disillusionment with politics. The disillusionment came out of the fact that a group of self-interested bankers had caused a massive effect on everybody's lives. After the banking crash, these bankers continue to exist in the same way with exactly the same practices and those who are responsible for the crash were not punished, and you just feel that politicians have made themselves ridiculous. It is because of these things the people are very, very angry. They have suffered and they felt that they should try a different form of politics and that undoubtedly accounts for Britain voting for Brexit. The decision to leave the European Union comes out of entirely understandable motives, which is a disillusionment with democratic politics.

The other event was the invasion of Iraq where the government did what the people didn't want. The government went to war without the permission of the people.

You have adapted for stage Katherine Boo's non fiction Behind the Beautiful Forevers which is set in a Mumbai slum. Tell us about that.

Katherine worked, wrote and lived with the people of Annawadi slum, which is located near the end of the runway of Mumbai airport (Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport). It's a wonderful work of reportage in which she is saying 'look actually, a slum is only global capitalism, just a bit small'. Within this slum society, you will find all the things that are going on in the society at large. So, huge factors like the Chinese deciding to build an Olympic stadium will make rubbish more valuable in Annawadi and everyone prospers and then the financial crash in Wall Street, which is a place nobody has ever heard of in Annawadi, makes everybody's life hell and people start eating rats for survival. So, what Katherine is trying to do is link the microcosm with the macrocosm.

She blows the myth that the poor don't suffer in exactly the way that you would suffer if it were happening to you. And, the people who live in the slums are complicated characters, just as complicated as you and I are, and to imagine that they are in any way blunted or numbed by what is happening to them is patronising them. Katherine brings them to life as people.

Once I had written the play, I went to Mumbai in 2014 to meet these people. After meeting them, I made a few changes in the play and also added some of my own observations. Also, we have made sure that some of the money goes back to the people of Annawadi. Because we felt very strongly, rather Katherine felt very strongly, that she couldn't, as it were, exploit these people, make literature out of them and then just leave them behind.

How do you find contemporary films?

In the English-speaking cinema, it is now very difficult to make serious pictures. Producers have lost confidence in anything except prequels, sequels, epics and action films. The kind of films that I make, which are about human beings, are harder to make. Every year there is a couple, like Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea, which becomes very very successful, but by and large they are very few and nearly all the work about human beings is now on television. The audience is much more excited by long-form television than by cinema because cinema has copped out of exactly the kind of subjects that really matter.