June 24, 2024 • 37 mins
Quite often, people say to me, ‘I couldn’t possibly have you to dinner, you’re the chef of the river café, cooking for you would be overwhelming.’ That’s how I feel about introducing Sir David Hare. How do you write for one of the greatest writers of our generation? Whether he's scripting acclaimed plays like Skylight, Plenty, Stuff Happens, or movies like The White Crow, Denial, or The Reader, David is nothing short of a master of the written word.
But I do think David and I have much in common. We both like being hosts; me, in The River Cafe, and David at his home, where he understands the theatre of sitting at a table. We both know that if food brings a table to life, so do the people around it.
Today, we are here together in the River Cafe to talk about food, memories, theatre, travel and more. It would be natural to feel overwhelmed, but David makes it easy, and I just feel delighted, and lucky, to have him here.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Quite often people say to me, I couldn't possibly have
you to dinner. You're the chef of the River Cafe
and cooking for you would be overwhelming. That's how I
feel about introducing Sir David Hare. How do you write
for one of the great playwrights of our generation? Skylight plenty,
stuff Happens, Beat the Devil, screenplays for movies, The Hours, Damage,
(00:25):
The White Crow, to name a few. But I do
think David and I do have much in common. We
both like being hosts, me in the River Cafe and
David in his home, where he understands the theater of
sitting at a table. We both know that if food
brings a table to life, so do the people around it.
And for David, apparently the ingredients for good night are
(00:47):
always carefully considered. We also share a love for what
we do, and I think we're both defined by our
commitment investment in social and political issues of the day.
In the past few days, I've been spoken to many
of the actors and directors who say that working for
him was an honor and a huge part of their career.
(01:08):
David's commitment to the written word on stage and screen
is only rivaled by his love for sculptor Nicole Fari,
his beautiful, brilliant wife of over thirty years. A commitment
to our partner's mind, to Richard Rodgers is yet another
thing we share today. We are here together in the
River Cafe to talk about food, memories, theater, travel and more.
(01:31):
It'd be natural to feel overwhelmed, but David makes it easy,
and I just feel delighted and lucky to have him here.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
How kind of you, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I have just come from the River Cafe kitchen and
you said that you wanted to do the recipe for
squid rocket and chili. And was that had that had
something to do with your memory of Rose? If we're
talking about memories.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I knew Rose that winter, which you can s so.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Rose Gray, the co founder with me of the River Cafe.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Will know more about this than I did. I knew
Rose Gray. And Rose went out to Tuscany one winter,
not to start a restaurant at all, but to start
a cook to write a cookbook. And she went for
six months to stay in the house of Henry Moore's
daughter Mary Moore, and so I knew her then, and
she came back with I can see the book in
my head with all this, all these sort of notebook
(02:22):
full of recipes, and somehow, which I've never understood, how
you managed to push her off course and to get
her to open a restaurant and not to write a cookbook.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
You don't want to write a cookbook? Grow do you
want to come and open a little cafe in Harrismith?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Did you say that to her?
Speaker 2 (02:37):
She'd always been a passionate cook when I first met her,
before she went tiddly, and then I think she took
that time to really get into the kind of cooking
of Tuscany, to learn the recipes. And she was a
beautiful draftsman. She draw everything. We would sit at a
table talking about it to mate them and she'd say
this is the one I want and draw it. Yeah,
(02:58):
And so I think she can buy the illustrations with
the recipes. And she came back and she went to
work with Anthony Carlucco. And so then when Richard had
this space here, you know, we were looking for people
to do it, and I called up Rose and said,
do you want to do this with me? Should we do
it together? And within the day we decided to se
are you saying eighty seven? Well yeah, talking to her
(03:19):
in eighty six probably, and then opening in eighty seven,
but it was teeny tiny and then the rest is history.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I chose this recipe because it's the first thing I
ever had here and I can remember. And I came
with Julie Christie, and Julie said to me, have the squid.
It's the best thing, because she'd been before and she
told me to have the squid. And I had the squid,
and I've never forgotten the taste, and I've just tasted
it in your kitchen.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
It's exactly thirty seven years later.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
It tastes exactly the same, which is an amazing achievement.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So would you like to read the recipe that you chose.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Six medium squid, twelve red chilies, seated, chopped, two hundred
and twenty five grams of rocket, and three lemons. Clean
the squid, and, using a serrated knife, score the inner
side of the flattened squid body with parallel lines one
centimeter apart. Do the same the other way to make
(04:16):
cross hatching for the chili sauce. Put the chopped chili
in a bowl and cover with the oil. Place the
squid scored side down on a hot grill, season and
grill for one or two minutes. Yeah, but your grill's
much nicer than most home grills.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And even on any grill won't take very long time.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Turn the squid over, they will immediately curl up, by
which time they will be cooked. You toss the rocket
in olive oil and lemon. You plate with some of
the rocket. You spoon the chili sauce on the squid,
and you serve with lemon. And there is actually no
better lunch than that. It's sort of the best thing
to eat between noon and one o'clock on a weekday.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
The River Cafe is excited. We're opening the River Cafe. Cafe.
Come for a morning Brioschian cappuccino, a plate of seasonal
antipasity on the terrace, or an ice cream or a
peratibo in the sun. We can't wait to open and
we cannot wait to welcome you. I want to talk
(05:30):
about your childhood and growing up and going to the
school where food was poisonous, but maybe we should just
start at the beginning of your time in London for now,
and then go back to that. Tell me about restaurants.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Well, I very much agree with Michael Winner. I can't
say that about many things, but I very much agree
with Michael Winner when you said everyone thinks there's been
a food revolution, but actually the food was better in
the nineteen fifties and sixties, And of course that's not
universally true, meaning buying large food was terrible. Of course
it was in Britain, it was absolutely awful. But maybe
(06:04):
because each restaurant was the first place that you tasted
wonderful things, they seemed more wonderful because of that. In
other words, when I first met Michael Winner, I was
running the Cambridge Film Society and I was inviting him
to show his film I'll never forget what was his name,
and he took me to Cuovardis Well. I mean, if
you've been a boy who'd been brought up in bex
(06:26):
Hill in the nineteen fifties, then Clovardist was just beyond
anything you could imagine. It was so delicious. And I
wrote down a few of the other places that we
used to go. Jimmy's, of course, Jimmy's a Greek Jimmy's,
the famous Greek Streep when you went downstairs, where you
went downstairs and you had beef steering chips for three
and six months and it was so delicious. The Amalfi,
(06:49):
which was the only place where you could get a pizza.
This is before Pizza Express.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Were we talking fifties, which I was sixties.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Sixties, that's early sixties. Young Friends. You had to drive
down towards Stratford East and there was a Chinese restaurant
down there called Young Friends that was so delicious. I
can still taste it. And we thought nothing of driving
for an hour down to the East Dend to go
to Young Friends because it was the only place you
could get really top right Chinese food. I'm hoping everyone's
(07:18):
salivating at the memory of this. The Ganges, of course,
the Indian restaurant in what is now Chinatown a Gerrard
Street and The Ganges was run by Calcutta Communists and
the guy who ran it worked on a share of
the take for everybody who worked in the restaurant, so
that everybody was paid equally, regardless of whether they were
(07:40):
a cook or a waiter or the owner or whatever
your job was. Because they were communists, and they cooked
the best prawn partier I have ever tasted in my life.
I will never taste a porn partier as good as
that again. Or maybe it's just it's because it's the first.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
But do you know, I think there are writers, actors, musicians,
Paul McCartney for one, footballers Dave Beckham, they really measure
their success in terms of where they were able to eat,
you know, so they remember the first time Beckham will
say that he went to a restaurant where he didn't
have to look at the prices first, or when Paul
McCartney toldly had a good bottle of wine, and that
(08:17):
it became kind of seeing their career through the trajectory
of where they were able to eat.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
It's so true, isn't it. But what I loved was
all these places. You know, I'm going to remember Schmids.
You're too young to know. Schmidts was Eastern European food
in Charlotte Street where you could have again, there was
a lot of berth Berg in Yon, sort of those
kind of stewy Eastern European food, very very very cheap
(08:47):
and absolutely delicious, and that there's less of. That's what
I think that there was that whole idea that the
best food might be really cheap.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Sometimes the best food was cheap, and sometimes it was
just such a great experience to go to a restaurant
where everybody was having fun. You know that you didn't
feel intimidated, you didn't feel that if you didn't know
the wine list, everybody'd be looking down on you, but
that restaurants were fun. Did you go to restaurants as
a child? Did your parents ever take you to restaurants.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
My dad was a sailor, and so basically it was
austerity at home, and then one month of the year
he'd come in with a big roll of notes that
he you know, he would come with an elastic band
full of five pound notes. We lived in in austere,
(09:37):
cheerless Britain, and he'd roll in with, you know, all
this money, and he'd take us out to a steakhouse
in Hastings on the front, which of course was run
by Cypriots, as steakhouses then were, and we would have
what would seem to us and unimaginably luxurious. And also
(09:57):
because he was the purser on the ship, all this
stuff would come to the house like a whole lamb.
I mean, you know, off the side from piano, and
so ridiculous quantities of things you couldn't deal with would
suddenly arrive in the house when there was no food
when he was away because he didn't leave much behind.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Him, and your mother cooked for you every day.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
My mother cooked and she was so did she have
to have direct and she was.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
I believe you were there? How many of me?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And my sister too. And when I divorced from my
first wife, she said, but who's going to look after you?
And I said, well, I'm going to look after myself.
And she said, but the earning, the cleaning, the cooking,
Who's going to do that? And I said, well I
probably have to do that myself, won't I And my
mother just couldn't understand. She just couldn't understand how a
man could live alone, because it's sort of if that
(10:47):
was possible. What was her life about because her life
had been about.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Caring about us? Yeah, and what did she cook for you?
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Stovey potatoes? Do you know that? Okay, well stovee but
I've looked it up since I said I was going
to mention it. And apparently you can put anything you like,
for instance, you bowl the potatoes and then you pour
over the fat from Sunday's joint over it to make
them taste, or you put the shreds of the remains in.
(11:14):
But it's basically meat, vegetables and potatoes bald together. And
that was was good, absolutely delicious, very very good. How
can It's a peasant dick and Scottish food was very
basic like that. And the beloved things were stovey potatoes,
(11:36):
hagish obviously, which is you know, a quiet taste, but
I love it. And mints, which I gather now is
on posh menus.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Just as your mother came from Scotland to tastings.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Yeah, she met my father during the war in Grinnock.
He was in the Royal Navy during the war and
so she was working in the Wrens and they met
in Grinnock, down the Estuary from Paisley. Paisley is a
suburb of Glasgow from which the famous Scottish playwright John
Byrne came from there, and John writes brilliantly about Paisley
(12:11):
and Paisley is one of the roughest towns in Scotland.
It is a really, really tough place. And it made
my mother a very, very timid woman. She spent her
whole life terrified and particularly terrified of men, because she
getting home at Saturday night over the rolling drunks in
Paisley had made her very very frightened.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
And so growing up then you went to boarding school.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I went to a school called Lancing.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Oh Lancing, yeah, I know that.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
And my contemporaries were three of us, all entered show business,
Tim Rice, who was a little bit older than me,
and Christopher Hampton and me. So there's this extraordinary coincidence
that all three of us were at school together. I
have a friend who's a headmaster who says he's worked
in many, many schools, but he has never seen food
(12:58):
served to anybody as disgusting as the food that we
were served at Lancing in the nineteen sixties. I just
remember carried eggs with a skin over them. I remember
fish in white sauce with a skin over it. I
remember everything with a skin over it. And I particularly
remember that they put tea leaves in a sock and
(13:20):
lowered the sock into an urn and poured boiling water
into the urn and used a sock as a form
of tea bag and it was primeval.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Yeah, and no wonder why because it must have been
a school that encouraged Did it encourage you three of
you to be involved in drama the arts at all?
Speaker 1 (13:41):
We were lucky enough to be at an old fashioned
public school which was going through a period of humanist revival,
and we were encouraged. You know, we had an art
film society in which we were looking at Bergmann films
and Fellini films and Antonioni films, and these were being
shown to us at the age of sixty. We had
a couple, I had a couple of brilliant, enlightened teachers
(14:04):
who did the classic thing of infusing you with love
of French and German literature and English literature and the
arts and drama and film. And we were just very
very lucky.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
But not food.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
So not food at all.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Food.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
So for food you had to go into and you
go into Brighton. I couldn't afford to go to English Is,
which was the fish restaurant. Do you know that one?
You know nothing?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I know nothing, You know nothing.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Teach me you know nothing. That's sol to be you
educated of You have no idea how difficult it was
to eat well and then how satisfying it was to
manage to eat well, because the basic diet of the
British was disgusting.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I always say they came out of a war, you know,
they came out of rational and cut them some slack.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
I've just read a novel by Margonite Laski, which who
was a sort of forties intellectual, called The Lost Child,
and it's about a man who goes from England to
try and find his child. In France in nineteen forty
five and France in ninety forty five, everyone's eating absolutely wonderfully,
and the first thing he says is, oh my god.
(15:17):
France was an occupied country under the Nazi rule, which
you know, suffered terribly during the Second World War, and
yet there's all this gorgeous food, whereas in London by
the end of the war there was absolutely nothing left
at all, the people reaching cabbages and turnips and busps.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Would you eat when when you're writing I.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Can't eat before the theater, You.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Can't before I play. Nobody I haven't met. I've only
met one person who could eat before, during, and after,
and that was Emily Blunt. Otherwise everybody says.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
They can You mean when she's actually performed, she has.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
A hamburger, like before she goes on and then she
has a hamburger sometimes in the middle of the between eggs. Yeah,
she's an eider.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That is absolutely extraordinary, isn't it. The advantage of running
a traveling theater, which we did from nineteen sixty eight
to nineteen seventy one, was you go to a regional city,
you do the show that by nine point thirty there
was nowhere to eat, absolutely nowhere. So we always ended
up in the gay club because every single city I
(16:18):
can remember the gay club in York, I can remember
the gay club in Gloucester. You know, every city you
went to there would be a gay.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Club or was it quite closeted?
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Yeah, it was pretty closeted. It was usually downstairs. You'd
usually go downstairs and then they'd usually be red velvet
and sort of you know, a bit of decor, and
then down it of course would be the liveliest and
most fun and most interesting place in the town. And
it was the place where people who didn't go to
bed at ten o'clock wiled away the hours till one
(16:47):
or two.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
What was the food like at a gay club?
Speaker 1 (16:50):
They were okay, it was okay. Yeah, there's usually be
something you could eat that was decent, decent to eat.
And it was the same in London. There were actors
clubs in London that were are gay ish, they were
predominantly gay or a couple in London where you were,
and they were very They were basically places where actors
went to after the show and they were very, very nice,
(17:13):
and it made you feel you were part of a
community and that you were part of a way of
life and that you were you were all in it together.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I can understand why an actor might not eat for
the performances as the writer, why wouldn't you eat?
Speaker 1 (17:26):
You're just toy with nerves.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
And then after you were able to go out, because
that's the thing is that you go out, you go.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah. And probably the career of Jeremy King is entirely based,
isn't it. I mean a Parice and all those restaurants
Schiky's in that they're entirely based on their reputation for
being places where actors go. Because Jeremy always had that
very simple philosophy that people go as much to stare
at the other times as they do to eat the food.
(18:00):
Erby King again, who I probably knew right at the
very beginning of when he first started. You know, he
just worked out that if you could see actors, and
in fact, you know, at the National Theater, we always
had the problem that nobody would go to that restaurant.
The restaurant was always a disaster, and I remember Jeremy
(18:20):
was asked, what do you do about it? He said,
let the actors eat their half price, and if the
audience believes they will see the actors after the show,
then they will go to that restaurant. If you know,
if you go to the show and afterwards you see
I don't know, Tony Hopkins or Judy Dench, then of
course it seems like a good restaurant. But if you
(18:43):
go and it's just you and the wind whistling ground,
it's not very cheerful.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
There's actually they say, there's a good restaurant there, now
have you as it's very touchingly named the Lastin which
is named after Dennis Lasten.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
I have to be very careful about this because actually
that restaurant, believe it or not, is when I first
saw my wife.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
See her across the crowded room.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I did, did you I'd written a play called Murmuring
Joges Yes, and at the technical rehearsal, the leading lady's
clothes were very poor, and I said to Bob Crowley,
who was the designer, I don't think very much of
what she's wearing. And Bob said, don't worry. I'm seeing
Nickel Farrey tomorrow. And I didn't know what that meant.
(19:25):
I remember, I'm seeing Nicole Fary. What that means? Then,
of course the leading lady, Alfonsia Emmanuel, turned up the
next day in the most dazzling clothes and I said, oh,
my goodness me, this is Nicol Farrey. Must be something.
And Bob said, well, you'll meet her because we'll give
her tickets for the first mart And so this is,
(19:48):
I'm afraid, a humble brag that she wasn't going to come,
But fortunately I went on late night Lineup the night
late night Lineup, Yeah, and she saw me on television
night before and she went, oh, maybe I will.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Go, yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
So she went and there she was on the first night.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
And do you go to restaurants of that now.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Hermets? You are well Because Nicole was a fashion designer
and so when she was a fashion designer. She was
out and about a lot. Now she's a sculptor. She
just wants to stay at home all the time, and
I'm very very happy watching television.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you. There are movies about meals that
(20:54):
people have, and there's wonderful plays about the kitchen and
the whole the plays that took place in restaurants.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
But in Skylight it's central.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
It's central. Carrie describes making spaghetti bolonnaise, and then there's
the scene of the parmesan.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
I'd just like to say that Carrie Mulligan's spaghetti bolinais,
which she had to make on stage every night, was
very very good.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Because she said that Stephen director, right, Stephen Stephen directed it,
and that he and you brought a chef from North
London who made a fantastic spaghetti boloneis with sausage.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
She came from Bologna and she said that the Bologna
bis what like sausage in it? Do you think that's true?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
I would not be surprised, but.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
It was always an interesting test of the actress's performance.
Whether anybody ate their spaghetti bolonnaise in the interval, said,
some people who've played that part, you know you, frankly
in the in the interval, would not necessarily want to
eat what they've cooked. But Carrie's was really good and
people would out around in order to he cares.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
She described it. She also said the garlic was sometimes
she had to be careful about eating too much garlic.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, because it's not very friendly to your fellow.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Act Let's just talk about the parmesan scene.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
The parmazan cheese is just that it's a joke about
the fact that he's a businessman and he's a restauranteur.
He's got restaurants in the King's Road. He was not,
I hastened to add, And everybody said to me, is
this meant to be Terrence Conran? And I kept saying,
it is not meant to be Terrence Conran. I barely
know Terrence Conrine, but everyone said it at the time,
And because he was sort of famous for having restaurants
(22:35):
in the King's Road. I suppose, but he's munificent, so
he can't bear her little piece of parmesan. He can't
bear sweaty piece of cheese wrapped in cellophane that she's
trying to put on top of her spaghetti. And so
he goes on and on about his supplies and stuff,
and they have an argument about it, and they also
have an argument about how to make spaghetti. Welln't it,
which is a contentious subject.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Is that something in your life that you would care
enough to have an argument someone about? Now?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
No, And I also love Nicole's cooking, so I don't
interfere in Nicole's cooking. She doesn't interfere in mine. So
I have to say, be hopeless is entertaining.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
And well, that's not what your guests say.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
It's only because Nicole. She was giving dinner parties long
before I arrived. If I had not met her, I
would not be giving dinner parties. I'm extremely shy, and
the only way I get over my shyness is by
riding on her coattails.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Well, okay, I'll let you tough it out with Fiona Golfer,
who said that it was her quote about being a
theatrical experience coming to your house for dinner.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
No, it's true that she is. She is a great hostess,
so all I do is floating her weight only.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
About being shy that you say that, I would not
know that about you, and you might not know that
about me, because of course where I'm out there, but
there is a real you. And I stand outside sometimes
didn't party think? Do I actually want to go in?
Speaker 1 (23:56):
You know, I've spent hours in the car parties and
you know, a dreading going in. And I certainly hate
listening to the audience at my plays.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Oh tell me about that. What do you mean listening
to that?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Well, I mean that hearing their comments, I have absolutely
no sense, you know. When I see a playwright standing
in the fobby, in the lobby greeting the I'm absolutely
amazed at there. And I have friends who don't have
any nerves at all. You know, Christopher Hampton, who's a
great friend of mine, sits at his plays with a
(24:33):
sort of beam on his face of how well everything
is going. Whereas I'm caring in terror and certainly run
as fast as I can before I overhear terrible things,
which the playwright, by the way, always.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Wonder whether you would hear the terrible things. But you're
missing the good things. You know, you're assuming that they're
going to say terrible things. But no.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Very early on I wrote a play and I heard
a man and he was leaving and his wife was
just putting her around him and saying, I'm sorry, darling.
That was my idea. I've never since then, and he
was going, it's all right, I don't mind, I don't mind.
We just wasted the evening. It was like that, And
so you just don't listen.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, Well, in the River Cafe, because we have an
open kitchen when I'm cooking, what I do is I
can see, you know, you can just see somebody's face.
You can see how you know they they taste something,
and then they look at their person next to them,
and you think, what do they say? Are they saying
if they say taste this, you know that you can
see them say, and then if they nod their head yes,
(25:36):
so they nod their head no, or.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
They beyond being hurt by it.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
No, I'm completely devastated. Yeah, no, I think I think
I have a part of me is like, well, I
know this was good, so why don't they.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Because one of the things that said to me most
that I find completely incomprehensible. They say to me, Oh,
you still care, do you? Oh yeah, and that as
if you Oh my goodness, I didn't think you'd be nervous.
Oh but you've written so many plays. How can you
possibly still be nervous?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Because you're so expected.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
It's hard to explain you're more nervous now in my
seventies than I was in my twenties, because I think
when you're in your twenties, you've got a certain arrogance
about what what Anthony Hopkins used to call stuffing the
bastard down their throat. Other words, you just if you
don't like it. Stuff You used to be the attitude
(26:28):
when you're young. When you're older, it's it's harder to
have that punk attitude as a playwright.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
And do you find that people sometimes feel they have
to tell you the truth?
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, Richard had that, you know. I just think you
should know that that last building, oh disappointing.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
People can't wait to tell you how disappointed they've been
with your latest work. And it's and I listened to
it in complete mystery. I'm not aware that I go
up I would never go up to you and say
I had a really terrible evening at the River Cafe,
just regard rude.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
I had somebody wrote to me the other day that say,
I had a fantastic lunch at the River Cafe and
it was so good because the last few times I've
been quite disappointing.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Okay, exactly exactly, the kicking, the compliments.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
But then who do you live? Because I sometimes the
people I wanted I want Back to Richard, I said, well,
who do you want criticism, honest criticism from? Would it
be another architect? Would it be? And he basically said,
the people I work with.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yes, it's the.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
People who you actually in the room working on it.
You know. With that I will tell you and then
you listen.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
I think that's what actors are doing, if the actors
are any good. I mean, the whole point of choosing
to work in a collaborative form is collaboration. And so
I'm not a novelist. I've written some poetry, but it's
a sideline. I've always worked in collaborative form.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
That's again similar, because that's right, and.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
What the actors are doing is putting intense scrutiny on
your work so that the chances are that they will
examine the work from one point of view you and
which you may not have considered as deeply from each
point of view as they do. And they say, if
I say that in that scene, why am I doing
(28:13):
that in that scene? How does that make sense? And
you are crazy if you don't listen to them. There
are certain authors, I'm afraid to say, who are too
arrogant to listen to the actors. And there are also
people who think that actors are always self interested and
it's always about, oh, my part will be that I
have a speech, my part will be better. But when
you're dealing with great actors, which is been my fortune
(28:36):
in life, you are crazy not to listen to them.
And you're also crazy not to respond to them when
they need something, because they sense that they need something.
There was a wonderful A wonderful example was when I
wrote Skylight and we were rehearsing it and Michael Gamban
said this wonderful thing to me, where he said, you know,
(28:57):
I've been on stage for two hours and I've got
a feeling that when I go to the dressing room
at the end of playing this play, I'm going to
be very miserable and depressed. He said, could you just
give me a line to get me out of this play?
Such a beautiful note. And I gave him a last
line before he left, and he just read it and
(29:18):
he went fantastic. Now I will enjoy the evening after
the play.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
But I wonder how many writers would do that.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
That's a great note. A note like that from an
actor like Gambit, It's inspiring.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I left a meeting the other day in New York
and I was with It was about television and working together,
and I was with this woman who's just very high
up in the station. We had a long meeting of
about an hour, and it was you know. And when
I left, I said, can I just ask you something?
She said, yes, Ruthie, what do you want to ask me?
I said, well, everybody's going to ask me how the
meeting went. Can you tell me how it went.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I try to give I try to give the actor
an enjoyable evening. When I started, I used to write
characters called barman or policeman, and that was somebody who
was in for an evening that was completely unrewarding. They
were going to walk onto the stage for two minutes
and say yes, sir, or can I get you another Scotch,
and you've got to think of it from the actor's
(30:18):
point of view about what a miserable evening that is
for an actor. And I try to make every part
worth playing, and there is some point to playing the part,
and there's something, even if it's a small part, that
there's something there that is worth it for the actor.
And I've tried to do that and it makes for
a much stronger feeling to the evening. But I want
(30:38):
to tell I want to tell the one story about
food and the performing arts, which is that I wrote Damage,
which was based on the Josephine Hart novel and was
directed by Louis mau who I adored and who to
me was just one of the nicest people I ever
met in my life. And he also knew a lot
about food and loved good food. I think he came
(30:59):
to eas at your ask. It's a domestic drama, like
a Greek tragedy. And when I've finally written the script
and I sent him the script, he said to me,
it is everything that filmmakers hate most. And I said,
what do you mean. He said, your script is based
around seven meals and seven fucks, and the two things
(31:22):
filmmakers hate. Most are meal scenes and fuck scenes. And
you've offered me seven of each. That's very funny, And
I said, yes, that's how the thought. The strug sued,
he said, oh god, I've got to think of new
ways of doing both.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
I remember the scene from Tom Jones, but that was
a great Yeah, but that's a great see, that's the
one that always sick.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Tom Jones is a brilliant, brilliant, beautiful. It's the best
food scene. Yeah, yeah, And it's partly because the actors
are so wonderful, Albert Finny and Joyce Redmand. But what
was so great about it was you really believe they
were eating it and tasting it. And that's the mark
of great actor is they're actually doing the thing that
they're meant to be doing, Whereas usually on a film set,
(32:06):
the food is very tired and it's been around and
it's been under the lights, and you know, people bring
fresh but there's very little sensual pleasure in a meal
that you're filming, whereas on Tom Jones, who really believed
people are relishing what they eat.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Since you talked about your mother, was she there for
your success as a playwright? She knew about it. She
shared it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
When she died, we found that she had kept a
clipping book about everything nice. And what's extraordinary is that
she was incredibly proud of my really worst reviews, and
in the clipping book would be appalling play by David
hare Right, terrible, a ghastly night at the theater. But
(32:50):
my mother didn't mind. She didn't mind because it meant
that I existed. And she would occasionally make some remark
like she'd say, I remember how one saying to me
that Bernard Levin he really doesn't like and I said, no,
he really doesn't like me. But nevertheless she kept all
Bernard Levin's appalling reviews. It was a very odd kind
(33:13):
of pride. It didn't worry how what was said. It
was just proof that I existed. She said the most
wonderful thing about my first play, which was absolutely filthy.
I mean, it was just, you know, the language was filthy,
that there was a lot of sex references, there was
a lot of there was some sex between women, and
(33:34):
you know, it was really quite a difficult evening for
my parents, and my mother's most gracious way of dealing
with it was to say, at the end, she said, well,
I enjoyed it very much, dear, though your father, having
been in the Navy, understood rather more of it than
I did.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
I have my father. Do you remember the actor Eli Wallack. Yeah,
so my father was friends from Brooklyn. He grew up
with the Wallacks. Eli always played the role of the
bad guy. You know, he was like he certainly looked
like a bad guy. And he was in a lot
of Westerns. And so they would take his mother, who
was an immigrant from Russia or Hungry, into these movies.
(34:13):
And she came out of a movie once and she
said to her friend, I'm not going to any more
movies where people clap when Eli is killed. You know,
are you writing now? Are we allowed to ask you
that question? Somebody said, never ask it right of what
they're doing, or an actor, what they're acting, what they're.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
John Osbourne, what did he say? It was? John Osbourne's
famous line is nobody shays to an accountant, done any
interesting accounselate?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
I've written three plays and I'm waiting for them to
go on good. It takes forever because people have lost
their nerve. There's a post COVID terror has partly, of course,
the audience is not back for straight players in the
same numbers. Secondly, there is a sort of feeling that
nobody can quite knows what to do. And then thirdly,
(35:03):
people are just moved to make it feel more like
the film industry, so that the idea that a writer
can just write a play and send it in and
will be ahead of taste when they do that. Now
it's like the film industry. The producer rings you up
and saying, will you write a play about such and such?
I've got this idea for a play, can you write
this for me? And that the whole beauty of the
(35:25):
theater was that it used to not be that. Whereas
I'm afraid now there's a television series, would you like
to write a play based on that television series? You know,
there's a musical? Would you like to write? And it's
people ringing you up saying will you do this? Whereas
the idea that a person, man, woman, child, whatever sits alone,
(35:45):
comes up with their own idea, sends it in and
you are excited to put it on that I'm afraid
is passing a little.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
My last question to you is a question I ask
everyone on the podcast. If you had a food you
wanted for comfort. If you were in a situation where
you wanted something to eat that would make you feel happier, calmer, better.
Is there a comfort food that you go Would it
be the food that you grew up something from?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (36:14):
What would it be?
Speaker 1 (36:15):
I to do sol Monia?
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Would you?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
I think so Monia. I've had it here actually quite recently.
It was fantastic.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah. Yeah, we cook it in the wood oven.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, but you don't you don't do it in batter.
Do you do the soul, but you don't do the money?
The money. Yeah, that's the thing that makes you feel
that old is well with I think sol monia that's
my death row meal.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Okay, well we're not dying. We're getting comfort, and now
we're going to go and have it. We can have
it over so it might not be, but we can
make it any way you want. Thank you, David Hare,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
It's good. Thank you for listening to Ruthie's table for
in partnership with Montclair
You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Quite often people say to me, I couldn't possibly have
you to dinner. You're the chef of the River Cafe
and cooking for you would be overwhelming. That's how I
feel about introducing Sir David Hare. How do you write
for one of the great playwrights of our generation? Skylight plenty,
stuff Happens, Beat the Devil, screenplays for movies, The Hours, Damage,
(00:25):
The White Crow, to name a few. But I do
think David and I do have much in common. We
both like being hosts, me in the River Cafe and
David in his home, where he understands the theater of
sitting at a table. We both know that if food
brings a table to life, so do the people around it.
And for David, apparently the ingredients for good night are
(00:47):
always carefully considered. We also share a love for what
we do, and I think we're both defined by our
commitment investment in social and political issues of the day.
In the past few days, I've been spoken to many
of the actors and directors who say that working for
him was an honor and a huge part of their career.
(01:08):
David's commitment to the written word on stage and screen
is only rivaled by his love for sculptor Nicole Fari,
his beautiful, brilliant wife of over thirty years. A commitment
to our partner's mind, to Richard Rodgers is yet another
thing we share today. We are here together in the
River Cafe to talk about food, memories, theater, travel and more.
(01:31):
It'd be natural to feel overwhelmed, but David makes it easy,
and I just feel delighted and lucky to have him here.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
How kind of you, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I have just come from the River Cafe kitchen and
you said that you wanted to do the recipe for
squid rocket and chili. And was that had that had
something to do with your memory of Rose? If we're
talking about memories.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I knew Rose that winter, which you can s so.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Rose Gray, the co founder with me of the River Cafe.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Will know more about this than I did. I knew
Rose Gray. And Rose went out to Tuscany one winter,
not to start a restaurant at all, but to start
a cook to write a cookbook. And she went for
six months to stay in the house of Henry Moore's
daughter Mary Moore, and so I knew her then, and
she came back with I can see the book in
my head with all this, all these sort of notebook
(02:22):
full of recipes, and somehow, which I've never understood, how
you managed to push her off course and to get
her to open a restaurant and not to write a cookbook.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
You don't want to write a cookbook? Grow do you
want to come and open a little cafe in Harrismith?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Did you say that to her?
Speaker 2 (02:37):
She'd always been a passionate cook when I first met her,
before she went tiddly, and then I think she took
that time to really get into the kind of cooking
of Tuscany, to learn the recipes. And she was a
beautiful draftsman. She draw everything. We would sit at a
table talking about it to mate them and she'd say
this is the one I want and draw it. Yeah,
(02:58):
And so I think she can buy the illustrations with
the recipes. And she came back and she went to
work with Anthony Carlucco. And so then when Richard had
this space here, you know, we were looking for people
to do it, and I called up Rose and said,
do you want to do this with me? Should we do
it together? And within the day we decided to se
are you saying eighty seven? Well yeah, talking to her
(03:19):
in eighty six probably, and then opening in eighty seven,
but it was teeny tiny and then the rest is history.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I chose this recipe because it's the first thing I
ever had here and I can remember. And I came
with Julie Christie, and Julie said to me, have the squid.
It's the best thing, because she'd been before and she
told me to have the squid. And I had the squid,
and I've never forgotten the taste, and I've just tasted
it in your kitchen.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
It's exactly thirty seven years later.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
It tastes exactly the same, which is an amazing achievement.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So would you like to read the recipe that you chose.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Six medium squid, twelve red chilies, seated, chopped, two hundred
and twenty five grams of rocket, and three lemons. Clean
the squid, and, using a serrated knife, score the inner
side of the flattened squid body with parallel lines one
centimeter apart. Do the same the other way to make
(04:16):
cross hatching for the chili sauce. Put the chopped chili
in a bowl and cover with the oil. Place the
squid scored side down on a hot grill, season and
grill for one or two minutes. Yeah, but your grill's
much nicer than most home grills.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And even on any grill won't take very long time.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Turn the squid over, they will immediately curl up, by
which time they will be cooked. You toss the rocket
in olive oil and lemon. You plate with some of
the rocket. You spoon the chili sauce on the squid,
and you serve with lemon. And there is actually no
better lunch than that. It's sort of the best thing
to eat between noon and one o'clock on a weekday.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
The River Cafe is excited. We're opening the River Cafe. Cafe.
Come for a morning Brioschian cappuccino, a plate of seasonal
antipasity on the terrace, or an ice cream or a
peratibo in the sun. We can't wait to open and
we cannot wait to welcome you. I want to talk
(05:30):
about your childhood and growing up and going to the
school where food was poisonous, but maybe we should just
start at the beginning of your time in London for now,
and then go back to that. Tell me about restaurants.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Well, I very much agree with Michael Winner. I can't
say that about many things, but I very much agree
with Michael Winner when you said everyone thinks there's been
a food revolution, but actually the food was better in
the nineteen fifties and sixties, And of course that's not
universally true, meaning buying large food was terrible. Of course
it was in Britain, it was absolutely awful. But maybe
(06:04):
because each restaurant was the first place that you tasted
wonderful things, they seemed more wonderful because of that. In
other words, when I first met Michael Winner, I was
running the Cambridge Film Society and I was inviting him
to show his film I'll never forget what was his name,
and he took me to Cuovardis Well. I mean, if
you've been a boy who'd been brought up in bex
(06:26):
Hill in the nineteen fifties, then Clovardist was just beyond
anything you could imagine. It was so delicious. And I
wrote down a few of the other places that we
used to go. Jimmy's, of course, Jimmy's a Greek Jimmy's,
the famous Greek Streep when you went downstairs, where you
went downstairs and you had beef steering chips for three
and six months and it was so delicious. The Amalfi,
(06:49):
which was the only place where you could get a pizza.
This is before Pizza Express.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Were we talking fifties, which I was sixties.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Sixties, that's early sixties. Young Friends. You had to drive
down towards Stratford East and there was a Chinese restaurant
down there called Young Friends that was so delicious. I
can still taste it. And we thought nothing of driving
for an hour down to the East Dend to go
to Young Friends because it was the only place you
could get really top right Chinese food. I'm hoping everyone's
(07:18):
salivating at the memory of this. The Ganges, of course,
the Indian restaurant in what is now Chinatown a Gerrard
Street and The Ganges was run by Calcutta Communists and
the guy who ran it worked on a share of
the take for everybody who worked in the restaurant, so
that everybody was paid equally, regardless of whether they were
(07:40):
a cook or a waiter or the owner or whatever
your job was. Because they were communists, and they cooked
the best prawn partier I have ever tasted in my life.
I will never taste a porn partier as good as
that again. Or maybe it's just it's because it's the first.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
But do you know, I think there are writers, actors, musicians,
Paul McCartney for one, footballers Dave Beckham, they really measure
their success in terms of where they were able to eat,
you know, so they remember the first time Beckham will
say that he went to a restaurant where he didn't
have to look at the prices first, or when Paul
McCartney toldly had a good bottle of wine, and that
(08:17):
it became kind of seeing their career through the trajectory
of where they were able to eat.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
It's so true, isn't it. But what I loved was
all these places. You know, I'm going to remember Schmids.
You're too young to know. Schmidts was Eastern European food
in Charlotte Street where you could have again, there was
a lot of berth Berg in Yon, sort of those
kind of stewy Eastern European food, very very very cheap
(08:47):
and absolutely delicious, and that there's less of. That's what
I think that there was that whole idea that the
best food might be really cheap.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Sometimes the best food was cheap, and sometimes it was
just such a great experience to go to a restaurant
where everybody was having fun. You know that you didn't
feel intimidated, you didn't feel that if you didn't know
the wine list, everybody'd be looking down on you, but
that restaurants were fun. Did you go to restaurants as
a child? Did your parents ever take you to restaurants.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
My dad was a sailor, and so basically it was
austerity at home, and then one month of the year
he'd come in with a big roll of notes that
he you know, he would come with an elastic band
full of five pound notes. We lived in in austere,
(09:37):
cheerless Britain, and he'd roll in with, you know, all
this money, and he'd take us out to a steakhouse
in Hastings on the front, which of course was run
by Cypriots, as steakhouses then were, and we would have
what would seem to us and unimaginably luxurious. And also
(09:57):
because he was the purser on the ship, all this
stuff would come to the house like a whole lamb.
I mean, you know, off the side from piano, and
so ridiculous quantities of things you couldn't deal with would
suddenly arrive in the house when there was no food
when he was away because he didn't leave much behind.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Him, and your mother cooked for you every day.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
My mother cooked and she was so did she have
to have direct and she was.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
I believe you were there? How many of me?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And my sister too. And when I divorced from my
first wife, she said, but who's going to look after you?
And I said, well, I'm going to look after myself.
And she said, but the earning, the cleaning, the cooking,
Who's going to do that? And I said, well I
probably have to do that myself, won't I And my
mother just couldn't understand. She just couldn't understand how a
man could live alone, because it's sort of if that
(10:47):
was possible. What was her life about because her life
had been about.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Caring about us? Yeah, and what did she cook for you?
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Stovey potatoes? Do you know that? Okay, well stovee but
I've looked it up since I said I was going
to mention it. And apparently you can put anything you like,
for instance, you bowl the potatoes and then you pour
over the fat from Sunday's joint over it to make
them taste, or you put the shreds of the remains in.
(11:14):
But it's basically meat, vegetables and potatoes bald together. And
that was was good, absolutely delicious, very very good. How
can It's a peasant dick and Scottish food was very
basic like that. And the beloved things were stovey potatoes,
(11:36):
hagish obviously, which is you know, a quiet taste, but
I love it. And mints, which I gather now is
on posh menus.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Just as your mother came from Scotland to tastings.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Yeah, she met my father during the war in Grinnock.
He was in the Royal Navy during the war and
so she was working in the Wrens and they met
in Grinnock, down the Estuary from Paisley. Paisley is a
suburb of Glasgow from which the famous Scottish playwright John
Byrne came from there, and John writes brilliantly about Paisley
(12:11):
and Paisley is one of the roughest towns in Scotland.
It is a really, really tough place. And it made
my mother a very, very timid woman. She spent her
whole life terrified and particularly terrified of men, because she
getting home at Saturday night over the rolling drunks in
Paisley had made her very very frightened.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
And so growing up then you went to boarding school.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I went to a school called Lancing.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Oh Lancing, yeah, I know that.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
And my contemporaries were three of us, all entered show business,
Tim Rice, who was a little bit older than me,
and Christopher Hampton and me. So there's this extraordinary coincidence
that all three of us were at school together. I
have a friend who's a headmaster who says he's worked
in many, many schools, but he has never seen food
(12:58):
served to anybody as disgusting as the food that we
were served at Lancing in the nineteen sixties. I just
remember carried eggs with a skin over them. I remember
fish in white sauce with a skin over it. I
remember everything with a skin over it. And I particularly
remember that they put tea leaves in a sock and
(13:20):
lowered the sock into an urn and poured boiling water
into the urn and used a sock as a form
of tea bag and it was primeval.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Yeah, and no wonder why because it must have been
a school that encouraged Did it encourage you three of
you to be involved in drama the arts at all?
Speaker 1 (13:41):
We were lucky enough to be at an old fashioned
public school which was going through a period of humanist revival,
and we were encouraged. You know, we had an art
film society in which we were looking at Bergmann films
and Fellini films and Antonioni films, and these were being
shown to us at the age of sixty. We had
a couple, I had a couple of brilliant, enlightened teachers
(14:04):
who did the classic thing of infusing you with love
of French and German literature and English literature and the
arts and drama and film. And we were just very
very lucky.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
But not food.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
So not food at all.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Food.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
So for food you had to go into and you
go into Brighton. I couldn't afford to go to English Is,
which was the fish restaurant. Do you know that one?
You know nothing?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I know nothing, You know nothing.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Teach me you know nothing. That's sol to be you
educated of You have no idea how difficult it was
to eat well and then how satisfying it was to
manage to eat well, because the basic diet of the
British was disgusting.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I always say they came out of a war, you know,
they came out of rational and cut them some slack.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
I've just read a novel by Margonite Laski, which who
was a sort of forties intellectual, called The Lost Child,
and it's about a man who goes from England to
try and find his child. In France in nineteen forty
five and France in ninety forty five, everyone's eating absolutely wonderfully,
and the first thing he says is, oh my god.
(15:17):
France was an occupied country under the Nazi rule, which
you know, suffered terribly during the Second World War, and
yet there's all this gorgeous food, whereas in London by
the end of the war there was absolutely nothing left
at all, the people reaching cabbages and turnips and busps.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Would you eat when when you're writing I.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Can't eat before the theater, You.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Can't before I play. Nobody I haven't met. I've only
met one person who could eat before, during, and after,
and that was Emily Blunt. Otherwise everybody says.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
They can You mean when she's actually performed, she has.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
A hamburger, like before she goes on and then she
has a hamburger sometimes in the middle of the between eggs. Yeah,
she's an eider.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That is absolutely extraordinary, isn't it. The advantage of running
a traveling theater, which we did from nineteen sixty eight
to nineteen seventy one, was you go to a regional city,
you do the show that by nine point thirty there
was nowhere to eat, absolutely nowhere. So we always ended
up in the gay club because every single city I
(16:18):
can remember the gay club in York, I can remember
the gay club in Gloucester. You know, every city you
went to there would be a gay.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Club or was it quite closeted?
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Yeah, it was pretty closeted. It was usually downstairs. You'd
usually go downstairs and then they'd usually be red velvet
and sort of you know, a bit of decor, and
then down it of course would be the liveliest and
most fun and most interesting place in the town. And
it was the place where people who didn't go to
bed at ten o'clock wiled away the hours till one
(16:47):
or two.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
What was the food like at a gay club?
Speaker 1 (16:50):
They were okay, it was okay. Yeah, there's usually be
something you could eat that was decent, decent to eat.
And it was the same in London. There were actors
clubs in London that were are gay ish, they were
predominantly gay or a couple in London where you were,
and they were very They were basically places where actors
went to after the show and they were very, very nice,
(17:13):
and it made you feel you were part of a
community and that you were part of a way of
life and that you were you were all in it together.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I can understand why an actor might not eat for
the performances as the writer, why wouldn't you eat?
Speaker 1 (17:26):
You're just toy with nerves.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
And then after you were able to go out, because
that's the thing is that you go out, you go.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah. And probably the career of Jeremy King is entirely based,
isn't it. I mean a Parice and all those restaurants
Schiky's in that they're entirely based on their reputation for
being places where actors go. Because Jeremy always had that
very simple philosophy that people go as much to stare
at the other times as they do to eat the food.
(18:00):
Erby King again, who I probably knew right at the
very beginning of when he first started. You know, he
just worked out that if you could see actors, and
in fact, you know, at the National Theater, we always
had the problem that nobody would go to that restaurant.
The restaurant was always a disaster, and I remember Jeremy
(18:20):
was asked, what do you do about it? He said,
let the actors eat their half price, and if the
audience believes they will see the actors after the show,
then they will go to that restaurant. If you know,
if you go to the show and afterwards you see
I don't know, Tony Hopkins or Judy Dench, then of
course it seems like a good restaurant. But if you
(18:43):
go and it's just you and the wind whistling ground,
it's not very cheerful.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
There's actually they say, there's a good restaurant there, now
have you as it's very touchingly named the Lastin which
is named after Dennis Lasten.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
I have to be very careful about this because actually
that restaurant, believe it or not, is when I first
saw my wife.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
See her across the crowded room.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I did, did you I'd written a play called Murmuring
Joges Yes, and at the technical rehearsal, the leading lady's
clothes were very poor, and I said to Bob Crowley,
who was the designer, I don't think very much of
what she's wearing. And Bob said, don't worry. I'm seeing
Nickel Farrey tomorrow. And I didn't know what that meant.
(19:25):
I remember, I'm seeing Nicole Fary. What that means? Then,
of course the leading lady, Alfonsia Emmanuel, turned up the
next day in the most dazzling clothes and I said, oh,
my goodness me, this is Nicol Farrey. Must be something.
And Bob said, well, you'll meet her because we'll give
her tickets for the first mart And so this is,
(19:48):
I'm afraid, a humble brag that she wasn't going to come,
But fortunately I went on late night Lineup the night
late night Lineup, Yeah, and she saw me on television
night before and she went, oh, maybe I will.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Go, yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
So she went and there she was on the first night.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
And do you go to restaurants of that now.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Hermets? You are well Because Nicole was a fashion designer
and so when she was a fashion designer. She was
out and about a lot. Now she's a sculptor. She
just wants to stay at home all the time, and
I'm very very happy watching television.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you. There are movies about meals that
(20:54):
people have, and there's wonderful plays about the kitchen and
the whole the plays that took place in restaurants.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
But in Skylight it's central.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
It's central. Carrie describes making spaghetti bolonnaise, and then there's
the scene of the parmesan.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
I'd just like to say that Carrie Mulligan's spaghetti bolinais,
which she had to make on stage every night, was
very very good.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Because she said that Stephen director, right, Stephen Stephen directed it,
and that he and you brought a chef from North
London who made a fantastic spaghetti boloneis with sausage.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
She came from Bologna and she said that the Bologna
bis what like sausage in it? Do you think that's true?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
I would not be surprised, but.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
It was always an interesting test of the actress's performance.
Whether anybody ate their spaghetti bolonnaise in the interval, said,
some people who've played that part, you know you, frankly
in the in the interval, would not necessarily want to
eat what they've cooked. But Carrie's was really good and
people would out around in order to he cares.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
She described it. She also said the garlic was sometimes
she had to be careful about eating too much garlic.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, because it's not very friendly to your fellow.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Act Let's just talk about the parmesan scene.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
The parmazan cheese is just that it's a joke about
the fact that he's a businessman and he's a restauranteur.
He's got restaurants in the King's Road. He was not,
I hastened to add, And everybody said to me, is
this meant to be Terrence Conran? And I kept saying,
it is not meant to be Terrence Conran. I barely
know Terrence Conrine, but everyone said it at the time,
And because he was sort of famous for having restaurants
(22:35):
in the King's Road. I suppose, but he's munificent, so
he can't bear her little piece of parmesan. He can't
bear sweaty piece of cheese wrapped in cellophane that she's
trying to put on top of her spaghetti. And so
he goes on and on about his supplies and stuff,
and they have an argument about it, and they also
have an argument about how to make spaghetti. Welln't it,
which is a contentious subject.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Is that something in your life that you would care
enough to have an argument someone about? Now?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
No, And I also love Nicole's cooking, so I don't
interfere in Nicole's cooking. She doesn't interfere in mine. So
I have to say, be hopeless is entertaining.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
And well, that's not what your guests say.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
It's only because Nicole. She was giving dinner parties long
before I arrived. If I had not met her, I
would not be giving dinner parties. I'm extremely shy, and
the only way I get over my shyness is by
riding on her coattails.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Well, okay, I'll let you tough it out with Fiona Golfer,
who said that it was her quote about being a
theatrical experience coming to your house for dinner.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
No, it's true that she is. She is a great hostess,
so all I do is floating her weight only.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
About being shy that you say that, I would not
know that about you, and you might not know that
about me, because of course where I'm out there, but
there is a real you. And I stand outside sometimes
didn't party think? Do I actually want to go in?
Speaker 1 (23:56):
You know, I've spent hours in the car parties and
you know, a dreading going in. And I certainly hate
listening to the audience at my plays.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Oh tell me about that. What do you mean listening
to that?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Well, I mean that hearing their comments, I have absolutely
no sense, you know. When I see a playwright standing
in the fobby, in the lobby greeting the I'm absolutely
amazed at there. And I have friends who don't have
any nerves at all. You know, Christopher Hampton, who's a
great friend of mine, sits at his plays with a
(24:33):
sort of beam on his face of how well everything
is going. Whereas I'm caring in terror and certainly run
as fast as I can before I overhear terrible things,
which the playwright, by the way, always.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Wonder whether you would hear the terrible things. But you're
missing the good things. You know, you're assuming that they're
going to say terrible things. But no.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Very early on I wrote a play and I heard
a man and he was leaving and his wife was
just putting her around him and saying, I'm sorry, darling.
That was my idea. I've never since then, and he
was going, it's all right, I don't mind, I don't mind.
We just wasted the evening. It was like that, And
so you just don't listen.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, Well, in the River Cafe, because we have an
open kitchen when I'm cooking, what I do is I
can see, you know, you can just see somebody's face.
You can see how you know they they taste something,
and then they look at their person next to them,
and you think, what do they say? Are they saying
if they say taste this, you know that you can
see them say, and then if they nod their head yes,
(25:36):
so they nod their head no, or.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
They beyond being hurt by it.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
No, I'm completely devastated. Yeah, no, I think I think
I have a part of me is like, well, I
know this was good, so why don't they.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Because one of the things that said to me most
that I find completely incomprehensible. They say to me, Oh,
you still care, do you? Oh yeah, and that as
if you Oh my goodness, I didn't think you'd be nervous.
Oh but you've written so many plays. How can you
possibly still be nervous?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Because you're so expected.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
It's hard to explain you're more nervous now in my
seventies than I was in my twenties, because I think
when you're in your twenties, you've got a certain arrogance
about what what Anthony Hopkins used to call stuffing the
bastard down their throat. Other words, you just if you
don't like it. Stuff You used to be the attitude
(26:28):
when you're young. When you're older, it's it's harder to
have that punk attitude as a playwright.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
And do you find that people sometimes feel they have
to tell you the truth?
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, Richard had that, you know. I just think you
should know that that last building, oh disappointing.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
People can't wait to tell you how disappointed they've been
with your latest work. And it's and I listened to
it in complete mystery. I'm not aware that I go
up I would never go up to you and say
I had a really terrible evening at the River Cafe,
just regard rude.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
I had somebody wrote to me the other day that say,
I had a fantastic lunch at the River Cafe and
it was so good because the last few times I've
been quite disappointing.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Okay, exactly exactly, the kicking, the compliments.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
But then who do you live? Because I sometimes the
people I wanted I want Back to Richard, I said, well,
who do you want criticism, honest criticism from? Would it
be another architect? Would it be? And he basically said,
the people I work with.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yes, it's the.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
People who you actually in the room working on it.
You know. With that I will tell you and then
you listen.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
I think that's what actors are doing, if the actors
are any good. I mean, the whole point of choosing
to work in a collaborative form is collaboration. And so
I'm not a novelist. I've written some poetry, but it's
a sideline. I've always worked in collaborative form.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
That's again similar, because that's right, and.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
What the actors are doing is putting intense scrutiny on
your work so that the chances are that they will
examine the work from one point of view you and
which you may not have considered as deeply from each
point of view as they do. And they say, if
I say that in that scene, why am I doing
(28:13):
that in that scene? How does that make sense? And
you are crazy if you don't listen to them. There
are certain authors, I'm afraid to say, who are too
arrogant to listen to the actors. And there are also
people who think that actors are always self interested and
it's always about, oh, my part will be that I
have a speech, my part will be better. But when
you're dealing with great actors, which is been my fortune
(28:36):
in life, you are crazy not to listen to them.
And you're also crazy not to respond to them when
they need something, because they sense that they need something.
There was a wonderful A wonderful example was when I
wrote Skylight and we were rehearsing it and Michael Gamban
said this wonderful thing to me, where he said, you know,
(28:57):
I've been on stage for two hours and I've got
a feeling that when I go to the dressing room
at the end of playing this play, I'm going to
be very miserable and depressed. He said, could you just
give me a line to get me out of this play?
Such a beautiful note. And I gave him a last
line before he left, and he just read it and
(29:18):
he went fantastic. Now I will enjoy the evening after
the play.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
But I wonder how many writers would do that.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
That's a great note. A note like that from an
actor like Gambit, It's inspiring.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I left a meeting the other day in New York
and I was with It was about television and working together,
and I was with this woman who's just very high
up in the station. We had a long meeting of
about an hour, and it was you know. And when
I left, I said, can I just ask you something?
She said, yes, Ruthie, what do you want to ask me?
I said, well, everybody's going to ask me how the
meeting went. Can you tell me how it went.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I try to give I try to give the actor
an enjoyable evening. When I started, I used to write
characters called barman or policeman, and that was somebody who
was in for an evening that was completely unrewarding. They
were going to walk onto the stage for two minutes
and say yes, sir, or can I get you another Scotch,
and you've got to think of it from the actor's
(30:18):
point of view about what a miserable evening that is
for an actor. And I try to make every part
worth playing, and there is some point to playing the part,
and there's something, even if it's a small part, that
there's something there that is worth it for the actor.
And I've tried to do that and it makes for
a much stronger feeling to the evening. But I want
(30:38):
to tell I want to tell the one story about
food and the performing arts, which is that I wrote Damage,
which was based on the Josephine Hart novel and was
directed by Louis mau who I adored and who to
me was just one of the nicest people I ever
met in my life. And he also knew a lot
about food and loved good food. I think he came
(30:59):
to eas at your ask. It's a domestic drama, like
a Greek tragedy. And when I've finally written the script
and I sent him the script, he said to me,
it is everything that filmmakers hate most. And I said,
what do you mean. He said, your script is based
around seven meals and seven fucks, and the two things
(31:22):
filmmakers hate. Most are meal scenes and fuck scenes. And
you've offered me seven of each. That's very funny, And
I said, yes, that's how the thought. The strug sued,
he said, oh god, I've got to think of new
ways of doing both.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
I remember the scene from Tom Jones, but that was
a great Yeah, but that's a great see, that's the
one that always sick.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Tom Jones is a brilliant, brilliant, beautiful. It's the best
food scene. Yeah, yeah, And it's partly because the actors
are so wonderful, Albert Finny and Joyce Redmand. But what
was so great about it was you really believe they
were eating it and tasting it. And that's the mark
of great actor is they're actually doing the thing that
they're meant to be doing, Whereas usually on a film set,
(32:06):
the food is very tired and it's been around and
it's been under the lights, and you know, people bring
fresh but there's very little sensual pleasure in a meal
that you're filming, whereas on Tom Jones, who really believed
people are relishing what they eat.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Since you talked about your mother, was she there for
your success as a playwright? She knew about it. She
shared it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
When she died, we found that she had kept a
clipping book about everything nice. And what's extraordinary is that
she was incredibly proud of my really worst reviews, and
in the clipping book would be appalling play by David
hare Right, terrible, a ghastly night at the theater. But
(32:50):
my mother didn't mind. She didn't mind because it meant
that I existed. And she would occasionally make some remark
like she'd say, I remember how one saying to me
that Bernard Levin he really doesn't like and I said, no,
he really doesn't like me. But nevertheless she kept all
Bernard Levin's appalling reviews. It was a very odd kind
(33:13):
of pride. It didn't worry how what was said. It
was just proof that I existed. She said the most
wonderful thing about my first play, which was absolutely filthy.
I mean, it was just, you know, the language was filthy,
that there was a lot of sex references, there was
a lot of there was some sex between women, and
(33:34):
you know, it was really quite a difficult evening for
my parents, and my mother's most gracious way of dealing
with it was to say, at the end, she said, well,
I enjoyed it very much, dear, though your father, having
been in the Navy, understood rather more of it than
I did.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
I have my father. Do you remember the actor Eli Wallack. Yeah,
so my father was friends from Brooklyn. He grew up
with the Wallacks. Eli always played the role of the
bad guy. You know, he was like he certainly looked
like a bad guy. And he was in a lot
of Westerns. And so they would take his mother, who
was an immigrant from Russia or Hungry, into these movies.
(34:13):
And she came out of a movie once and she
said to her friend, I'm not going to any more
movies where people clap when Eli is killed. You know,
are you writing now? Are we allowed to ask you
that question? Somebody said, never ask it right of what
they're doing, or an actor, what they're acting, what they're.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
John Osbourne, what did he say? It was? John Osbourne's
famous line is nobody shays to an accountant, done any
interesting accounselate?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
I've written three plays and I'm waiting for them to
go on good. It takes forever because people have lost
their nerve. There's a post COVID terror has partly, of course,
the audience is not back for straight players in the
same numbers. Secondly, there is a sort of feeling that
nobody can quite knows what to do. And then thirdly,
(35:03):
people are just moved to make it feel more like
the film industry, so that the idea that a writer
can just write a play and send it in and
will be ahead of taste when they do that. Now
it's like the film industry. The producer rings you up
and saying, will you write a play about such and such?
I've got this idea for a play, can you write
this for me? And that the whole beauty of the
(35:25):
theater was that it used to not be that. Whereas
I'm afraid now there's a television series, would you like
to write a play based on that television series? You know,
there's a musical? Would you like to write? And it's
people ringing you up saying will you do this? Whereas
the idea that a person, man, woman, child, whatever sits alone,
(35:45):
comes up with their own idea, sends it in and
you are excited to put it on that I'm afraid
is passing a little.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
My last question to you is a question I ask
everyone on the podcast. If you had a food you
wanted for comfort. If you were in a situation where
you wanted something to eat that would make you feel happier, calmer, better.
Is there a comfort food that you go Would it
be the food that you grew up something from?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (36:14):
What would it be?
Speaker 1 (36:15):
I to do sol Monia?
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Would you?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
I think so Monia. I've had it here actually quite recently.
It was fantastic.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah. Yeah, we cook it in the wood oven.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, but you don't you don't do it in batter.
Do you do the soul, but you don't do the money?
The money. Yeah, that's the thing that makes you feel
that old is well with I think sol monia that's
my death row meal.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Okay, well we're not dying. We're getting comfort, and now
we're going to go and have it. We can have
it over so it might not be, but we can
make it any way you want. Thank you, David Hare,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
It's good. Thank you for listening to Ruthie's table for
in partnership with Montclair
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