You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
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, 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 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. 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. It'd be natural to feel overwhelmed, but David makes it easy, and I just feel delighted and lucky to have him here.
How kind of you, Thank you.
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.
I knew Rose that winter, which you can see.
So Rose Gray, the co founder with me of the River Cafe.
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 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.
You don't want to write a cookbook? Grow do you want to come and open a little cafe in Harrismith?
Did you say that to her?
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, 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 Ros and said, do you want to do this with me? Should we do it together? And within the day we decided to Are you saying eighty seven, Well yeah, talking to her in eighty six probably, and then opening in eighty seven, but it was teeny tiny and then the rest is history.
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.
It's exactly thirty seven years later.
It tastes exactly the same, which is an amazing achievement.
So would you like to read the recipe that you chose.
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 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.
And even on any grill won't take very long time.
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.
The River Cafe is excited. We're opening the River Cafe Cafe. Come for a morning Briochian 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 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.
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 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 was his name, and he took me to Cuovardist. Well, I mean, if you've been a boy who'd been brought up in bex 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, which was the only place where you could get a pizza. This is before Pizza Express.
Were we talking fifties, which I was sixties.
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
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 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.
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 it became kind of seeing their career through the trajectory of where they were able to eat.
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 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.
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?
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, 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 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 him.
And your mother cooked for you every day. My mother cooked and she was so did she have to have a directness?
And she was believe you were there?
How many of me?
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
was possible. What was her life about, because her life had been about caring about us.
Yeah, And what did she cook for you?
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. 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 hagish obviously, which is you know, a quiet taste, but I love it, and mints, which I gather now is on posh menus.
Just as your mother came from Scotland to tastings.
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 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.
And so growing up, then you went to boarding school.
I went to a school called Lancing.
Oh Lancing, yeah, I know that.
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 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 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 it was primeval.
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?
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 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. But not food, so not food at all.
Food.
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?
I know nothing, You know nothing.
Teach me you know nothing.
That's soul 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.
I always say they came out of a war, you know, they came out of rational and cut them some slack.
I've just read a novel by Margonite Alaski, 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.
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.
Would you eat when when you're writing I.
Can't eat before the theater, You.
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.
They can you I mean when she's actually performed, she has.
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.
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 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 club.
Was it quite closeted?
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 or two.
What was the food like at a gay club?
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, 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.
I can understand why an actor might not eat for the performances. As the writer, why wouldn't you eat, you just to with nerves and then after you were able to go out, because that's the thing is that you go out, you go.
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 diners as they do to eat the food. 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 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 go and it's just you and the wind whistling ground, it's not very cheerful.
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.
I have to be very careful about this because actually that restaurant, believe it or not, is when I first saw my wife, see.
Her across the crowded room, I did, did.
You I'd written a play called murmuring joges yes, and 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. I remember, I'm seeing
Nicole far 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 Nickel Farrey must be something. And Bob said, well, you'll meet her because we'll give her tickets for the first night. And so this is, 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.
Go, yeah, yeah, And.
So she went, and there she was on the first night.
And do you go to restaurants of that now?
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.
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you please make sure to rape 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 people have, and there's wonderful plays about the kitchen and the whole the plays that took place in restaurants.
But in Skylight it's central.
It's central. Carrie describes making spaghetti bolonnaise, and then there's the scene of the parmesan.
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.
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.
She came from Bologna and she said that the bolognaise what like sausage in it? Do you think that's true?
I would not be surprised, but.
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.
She described it. She also said the garlic was sometimes she had to be careful about eating too much garlic.
Yeah, because it's not very friendly to your fellow.
Act Let's just talk about the parmesan scene.
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 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.
Is that something in your life that you would care enough to have an argument someone about? Now?
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.
And well, that's not what your guests say.
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.
Well, okay, I'll let you're tough it out with Fiona Golfer, who said that it was her quote about being a theatrical experience coming to your house for dinner.
No, it's true that she is. She is a great hostess. So all I do is floating her weight only.
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 didnner party, think do I actually want to go in?
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.
Tell me about that. What do you mean listening to that?
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 sort of beam on his face of how well everything is going. Whereas I'm carving in terror and certainly run as fast as i can before I overhear terrible things, which.
The playwright, by the way, always 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.
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.
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 you can see them say, and then if they nod their head yes, so they nod their head no, or they beyond being
hurt by it. 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.
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 because you're so expected.
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 when you're young. When you're older, it's it's harder to have that punk attitude as a playwright.
And do you find that people sometimes feel they have to tell you the truth? Oh? Yeah, Richard had that, you know. I just think you should know that that last building, oh disappointing.
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.
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.
Okay, exactly exactly, the kicking, the compliments.
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. Yes, it's the people who you actually in the room working on it. You know. With that I will tell you and then you listen.
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.
That's again similar, because that's right, and.
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 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 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, 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
he went fantastic. Now I will enjoy the evening after the play.
But I wonder how many writers would do that.
That's a great note. A note like that from an actor like Gambit, It's inspiring.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 is structure. He said, oh god, I've got to think of new ways of doing both.
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.
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 actors is they're actually doing the thing that they're meant to be doing, Whereas usually on a film set, 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 eating.
Since you talked about your mother, was she there for your success as a playwright, She knew about it, she shared it.
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 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 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 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.
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. 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 John Osbourne, what did he say?
It was John Osbourne's famous line is nobody shas to an accountant, done any interesting accounts late?
Yeah, that's true.
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, 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 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, 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.
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? Oh what would it be?
I to do sol Monia?
Would you?
I think so monia. I've had it here actually quite recently. It was fantastic.
Yeah. Yeah, we cook it in the wood oven.
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.
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, it's good.
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table for in partnership with Montclair