A good play doesn’t just chronicle events – it tells us about ourselves

When Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, he was not primarily interested in recording the story of the late Roman Republic; he was interested in what makes people tick, their dreams and their fears. When he wrote Henry V, he did not set out to answer the question, “Why did England go to war with France?” Rather, he gave us a warrior-king whose appetites and ambitions are like some unstoppable natural force – a king, by the way, who bears only the mildest resemblance to the flesh-andblood Henry V. We watch such plays with almost no thought for their notional historical context, and it is a rare production these days that features togas or doublets.

So when Sir David Hare says that playwrights ought to go beyond the mere recitation of historical facts, it ought to be a statement of the obvious. In a pointed nod toward several contemporary writers – perhaps most obviously James Graham – the ageing revolutionary has complained that they are “merely reiterating in the theatre events that we are already familiar with”.

Sir David’s oeuvre has never been to my taste. His political biases are so pronounced that you can usually tell which way his plays are going within minutes. He incarnates the theatrical establishment, the establishment that manages to think of itself as antiestablishment, having churned out reliable agitprop for the National Theatre since the Seventies. His most recent BBC screenplay, Collateral, operated a simple algorithm – immigrant or ethnic minority characters good, security forces bad – which, of course, robbed the work of any sense of drama.

This time, though, it is hard to take issue with the old Hampstead radical. A writer who aspires to set down conversations as they happened is not a dramatist but a stenographer. The difference between a documentary and a play is that the latter aspires to tell us something about ourselves rather than just the characters in front of us. A chronicle of events with a slight Left-wing twist is what the BBC calls current affairs. Semi-fiction with a proper Left-wing message? That’s drama. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion