Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a playwright and a theatre director.

He made his name in the 70s as a writer of left-wing intellectual drama.

With continued success, however, Palemic has given way to theatricality.

Plays like Plenty, Pravda, and on television Lickin 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. A man who was destined David, I understand,

to become an accountant, so what went wrong or indeed right?

Well I was brought up in a small town in Sussex and Bexhill on sea and when I was

15 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.

Are you, have you tired of the left-wing intellectual tag now that you've arrived at the

medium age of 41? No, not in the slightest.

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 generations of writers have made.

For some reason, I don't know, it was characteristic of writers of the 50s that they moved

to the right for personal reasons maybe.

...