The man who likes John Major

David Hare's new play may not be about public life, but Paul Taylor suspects it is bound to shed light on a highly political playwright

The manual that Tory prime ministers look to for credibility maintenance strongly advises against being singled out for praise by fashionable left-wing playwrights. When David Hare identified himself in the Sunday Telegraph earlier this month as an admirer of John Major ("for the first time since I became an adult, I am ruled by a man who appears fundamentally decent and honest"), it was the PM's detractors who rejoiced. "It seems to confirm a long-held view of mine," crowed a letter in the Evening Standard, "that the Conservative Party has a cupboard socialist as leader. Come `out', John, and `go over!' Let us have our Conservative Party back."

However, it was concern that there is now an unduly cupboard socialist leading the Labour Party that fuelled Hare's follow-up piece on Tony Blair. The party has to "want something a little more than mere occupation of office," he argued, suggesting Blair should hang over his desk the wise words of Harry Truman: "When there is a choice between conservatives and those in pragmatic approximation thereto, the voters will always opt for the real thing."

The idea that maintaining a political silence about socialist priorities is an electoral mistake was thrown up by Hare's last play, The Absence of War, which showed a Kinnock-like leader trapped in smart campaign packaging and muscled by his PR minders. For Gerald Kaufman, writing in this paper, the conclusion you were meant to draw was that if only the hero had been allowed to speak with his instinctive left-wing passion, he might have carried the party to victory. "The problem," Kaufman averred, "is that the sentiments stuffed into Jones's mouth... are exactly the kind of rubbish spoken in the 1983 election campaign and which brought about the worst Labour defeat of the century."

Viewers of the television version, directed, like the original, by Richard Eyre, and due for transmission on May 14, will have the chance to judge whether The Absence of War boils down to anything quite so simple. The notion that the play is a cautionary docu-drama about misguided tactics was not exactly discouraged by the knowledge that Hare had been granted privileged access by Kinnock to Labour's 1992 campaign, nor by the publication of Asking Around, a book of the interviews and eyewitness material that fed into his British Institutions Trilogy at the National.

Although The Absence of War often feels too tethered to its research, there are clear signs that it aspires not to faction but to classical tragedy. Hare evidently intends us to see the blokey, theatre-loving south London Labour leader George Jones (John Thaw) as a man who has made a Faustian, spiritually desiccating pact with respectability, and who becomes entangled in a tragic paradox. He's rendered the party electable, but only at the cost of betraying himself and of being considered its greatest electoral liability.

In a scene set in the leader's flat, there's an early 1970s-looking National Theatre poster for Long Days Journey into Night on a wall and in the TV version the camera keeps juxtaposing Thaw's head with Olivier's despairing profile. To members of his staff, George's penchant for the theatre and for viewing reality in a theatrical frame is a trying weakness. As one remarks, "there's a side of him that likes to step back. It's the bloody theatre. He likes tragedy too much. I don't; to me, tragedy's just a posh word for losing. This movement's had enough of bloody tragedies."

To left-wing dramatists like Brecht and Bond also, this genre was just a posh word for losing; it glamorises defeat, the argument goes, and neutralises activist energy in the satisfactions of vicarious emotions.

The televising of Absence of War, and the premiere next week at the Cottesloe of Skylight (a three-hander under close wraps but said not to be on a public theme) prompts a consideration of the ways in which Hare has developed of late.

Thatcherism has led to what amounts to a reversal in his attitude to British institutions and has released a respect, reflected in the trilogy, for those professionals (the police, the clergy in the inner cities) whose lot it has been to pick up the human pieces left in its ideological wake. A new warmth duly entered his plays, with not always comfortable effects.

Meanwhile, the spectacle of a right-wing female extremist seems to have complicated, valuably, his perception of idealism. It's a common criticism of his work that it conducts a curiously patronising form of positive discrimination, lumbering women with the role of being the play's conscience. A character like English resistance heroine Susan Thaherne, who, in his 1978 play Plenty, becomes a diatribe on legs when post-war English society fails to live up to her expectations, invites, moreover, the unflattering thought that the author overvalues her exhausting, unproductive dissent because he and she are essentially in the same boat. From their respective safe places within the English establishment, a cynic might argue, both confuse round-the-clock vituperation with true revolutionary spirit.

But in his masterpiece, the 1990 play Racing Demon, Hare discovered the dramatic power generated when there is a tension between idealistic protagonist and playwright. The young curate, a fundamentalist fanatic at odds with his liberal colleagues in the inner-city team ministry, wants to offer people religious certainties rather than glorified social work and thinks the ability to see all points of view is a sign of dithering impotence. Racing Demon proves its strength, though, precisely through its capacity to view the central collision of values from everyone's perspective, including his.

Good and evil, more "timeless" as themes than social justice and injustice, are now more at issue in his drama, as well as an alertness to their ambiguities. The Secret Rapture (1988) was written with the aim of demonstrating "how goodness can bring out the worst in all of us", as well as of showing how a certain kind of goodness was blighted by the materialist ethos of the late 1980s.

At the end of The Absence of War, the re-elected Conservative Prime Minister refers unctuously to the decency of his Labour opponent and also, with rather too convenient a nod to the genre Hare is here essaying, to the fact that the result constitutes for Jones "a personal tragedy". It will certainly be fascinating to see how his tragic sense develops. A rumoured biopic on the subject of Oscar Wilde sounds like ideal Hare material; a career with the arc of a Greek tragedy and a story in which the English establishment appears at its least lovely. An intriguing prospect - the author of The Soul of Man Under Socialism as viewed by one of the key anatomists of the soul of man under Thatcherism.

n Details for `Skylight' below