Hare says writers “don’t get” life. “And because we don’t get it, we are desperate to understand it ... that’s probably what all playwrights have in common, a certain curiosity about other people ... you’ve got to be interested, you’ve got to want to know.”

Good plays may be timeless, Hare says, but they absolutely depend on the context in which they’re presented. “If you lived in a communist country during a certain time, then a performance of Hamlet was the most revolutionary thing somebody could do. If you put Hamlet on, the audience understood that killing the king and avenging your father ... was effectively a protest against the regime. Hamlet was electric in Russia, or in Romania, or in Bulgaria. Whereas when you’re going to see Hamlet in Stratford, you just say, ‘oh, Mark Rylance is very good, but he’s not as good as David Tennant’.”

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Originally drawn to directing, he started to write and discovered he had a gift for dialogue. That evolved into a lifelong fascination with the formal problems of writing. “I’ve been trying to work out how the hell you do it. And the annoying thing of being my age, which is a feeling a lot of people have, is I’m just beginning to get the hang of it.”

Sir David Hare is in conversation with Don Watson at the State Library on March 7.