“Beat the Devil” is an unforgettable one-man play about surviving COVID-19 | Audible.ca
“Beat the Devil” is an unforgettable one-man play about surviving COVID-19
Audible founder Don Katz chats with renowned playwright David Hare about his new Audible Original, the power of great monologue, and what you can learn when you nearly lose your life.
Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Don Katz: My name is Don Katz. I'm Audible's founder. With a lot of inspired assistance by thousands of colleagues along the way, I had the privilege of leading Audible from an idea to a service embraced as a habit by millions of people around the world for 27 years. From the beginning until now, I've focused on defining and enhancing the Audible listening aesthetic alongside the celebration and elevation of gifted writers, performers, directors, and producers who offer Audible's listeners such powerful ways to spend their time.
Recently, I had the pleasure to meet and then serve as executive producer of an Audible Theater Original written and performed by a celebrated artist I had admired from afar for decades. is one of those people for whom a proper introduction could go on for an hour, a truly great playwright creating seminal works for the stage for over a half-century, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a poet, and via his art, essays, lectures, journalism, and public commentary, a fearlessly incisive and often hilariously sardonic observer of all things human and, inevitably, flawed. He is actually Sir David Hare, though he bristles at the elitist implications. He is the playwright and performer ofthe brilliant new 45-minute-long Audible Original about his experience of contracting COVID-19 in early 2020. Welcome, David.
David Hare: Thank you very much.
DK: I want to start by thanking you for this wonderful performance and for allowing me to record a personal introduction to your riveting soliloquy. Beat the Devil was written after you became one of the early victims of COVID, as news of gruesome early deaths and public confusion began to dominate public discourse. Beat the Devil is also deeply personal. The listener can feel and literally taste your experience of the then-terrifying virus, and you allow us to voyeuristically hear your artful and fulminating diary. Was it cathartic to write Beat the Devil then, and to perform it now? As cathartic as it seems to listen to it?
DH: Well, it came about really accidentally. What happened was that I was one of the first people to get the disease in England, and I got it very, very badly. Of course, at that time nobody understood it. One of the themes of the work is how I try to keep myself out of hospital because I'm so determined not to go in because I'm convinced that doctors don't understand the disease. And retrospectively, some months later, doctors said to me, "You were so right not to go into hospital because we were treating it all wrong." Within a few months, they'd learned how to treat it, and if you didn't have to die, you didn't. But in the early days, that was not true.
"I don't have survivor's guilt, I have survivor's rage."
So, I had no intention of writing about this experience until somebody from Radio 4, the BBC, said to me, "Will you do a three-minute spot where you describe what it is like to have this disease?" And I did it on the Today program, which is a very, very popular program in England. And I got the most extraordinary response, in the sense that so many people said, "Well, we've heard about COVID, but we actually have never heard anybody talk about what it is actually like to have it." Because everyone was at that point locked down in fear but not actually knowing what was involved in getting it badly. So, it was after that three-minute monologue that Nick Hytner at the Bridge Theatre asked me to expand it into a longer, as it were, meditation about what I'd learnt from my horrible few weeks, at times near to death.
DK: So, the journalistic and the quite personal reportage is clearly one of the most amazing parts of this piece, but it also is you as an artist kind of reflecting in a very deep and often profound way. Since apocalyptic disease is the backdrop of artistic expression hearkening back to biblical pestilence, the plagues unleashed by the gods in Greek theater; it was a backdrop to Chaucer and Shakespeare, to stories by Jack London, to Stephen King. Did you consider this piece about COVID to be part of an artistic tradition as you sat down to do it?
DH: No, not really. It's true that I wanted a 45-minute monologue not to be purely factual. I also wanted it to be a work of art. And by a work of art, what I mean by that is something which refers to ideas and feelings outside itself, that reflects on the world at large. And I think I've always been concerned to write about the line between necessary and unnecessary suffering. In other words, if you take the view that life is tragic because we are all going to die, I can't really argue with you. Life, in that sense, is tragic. But while we're here, I've always believed that it was possible to mitigate some of the worst effects of tragedy. And that process whereby we try not to suffer when we don't need to suffer, we developed various disciplines to achieve that. Education is one. Politics is another. Engineering is another. Medicine is another.
These are, if you like, to me, all the virtues, the great human virtues, the ones that make suffering not as bad as it needs to be. And if you nearly die, as I did, you will find yourself asking the question, “Did I need to go through this? Was this necessary?” And you didn't have to be very alert in Britain to the indifference or incompetence of our government, led by Boris Johnson, to know that a lot of people were dying who didn't need to. And so because of that, I think that, as I say, I don't have survivor's guilt, I have survivor's rage about, “Hold on, if this had been better managed, not so many people would've had to die.”
Okay, it was a tremendous medical challenge all over the world. And there were people who clearly were just completely thrown medically by what was going on because all sorts of signals that were usually interpreted in one way had to be interpreted in another. It was a crazy time for doctors, for hematologists, for anyone concerned with breathing, for anyone concerned with medicine in general, but it was also true that the preparations for the disease and the readiness of the British government to deal with the disease was catastrophically poor. We're now having an inquiry into that. It's taking years and years and years. Why don't they just read Beat the Devil, for goodness' sake?
DK: That's very important for anyone who hears this interview who hasn't experienced this incredible Audible listen, is that current politics seems to depend on the public's ability to forget even recent historical reality. And here is a piece that is categorical in what you call the deadly public lying that went on at the time. I mean, you note in Beat the Devil that a single horse race was allowed to go on outside of London as you were suffering, despite estimates that a quarter of a million people could die from simply attending the event. And you recall Johnson's moral and intellectual absurdities and what you call the corrupt narrative, and you do it in an incredibly incisive way. You also capture Donald Trump's similarly forgotten promise at the time that COVID-19 is not as bad as the flu, and this is before he contracts the disease that same year and infects many others who come in contact with him.
DH: In that sense, I hope the piece has the virtue of a diary and that extraordinary thing in a good diary where you go, "My God, did people really believe that at that point?" In other words, in March 2020 and in April 2020, people were just saying absolutely outrageous and outrageously stupid things, and doing outrageously stupid things and getting away with it. And now, in retrospect, you look at it and some public behavior was so reckless and crazy. Luckily, I recorded it. Not immediately, because I couldn't even lift a pen. I was keeping some sort of diary, and I mention the sort of worst moments in the diary. But I certainly wasn't formulating Beat the Devil. On the other hand, it was written in the heat, and it was written in the heat of discovery about what COVID was and how it had been handled as a public health issue.
"I want to expand subject matter so that you can go to the theater and come out knowing a lot more than when you went in."
DK: Right. But it is interesting, too, that while it was a diary, it also conforms to, frankly, the dream I had when I kind of launched the whole idea of Audible Originals and Audible Theater in 2016, which was to produce these great traditions of driving monologues and soliloquies, what theater people call “one-handers.” Because Audible, at its best, often engages this first-person, almost seductive intimacy, something actually proven out by neuronal research in London about the emotive effects of just listening to powerful first-person storytelling. So, it seems to me that it's part of a larger tradition. I just wonder if you could reflect a little bit. I mean, the long speech in theater, the killer soliloquy, is often the thing that people remember the most. Were you thinking that you were sort of in this monologue tradition as you either wrote it or recorded it?
DH: Well, I'd written a monologue before, and I wrote a monologue which I performed in London and in New York called Via Dolorosa, which was about a visit that I made to Palestine and Israel. And it was very much the same thing, that I went to Palestine and Israel without the slightest idea of what I was going to see. But when I got there, it was so unlike what everyone had told me it was going to be like that I was like a crazy man going, "Come on, I've got to get this down on paper to tell everyone, if you go to Palestine, if you go to Israel, it isn't at all the way it's represented generally.”
Just at the most basic level, the divisions within the societies were just as deep as the divisions between the societies. So, there were people in Palestine who believed one thing, people who believed another and who, as we have seen in the last year, were fighting for control of the country. And in the same way, within Israel, there was tremendous division of opinion, not just between religious and secular but between people who had a European ideal of the state and of what that socialist state should be, and obviously the military industrial complex, which as we record this today, is very much in the ascendant.
But it’s that. I love the immediacy of the monologue, which is, “Hey, I have got to tell you this. This is really interesting. Please listen to me.” And that sort of direct address, yeah, I love it. I love it from other people too. I'm the person who always wants to listen to the speech at the wedding. You know, everyone says, "Oh, my God, oh, there're going to be speeches, how boring." Not at all. The speeches, for me, are the best part of the wedding. I love it. I love what they reveal about the person who's talking. And that, of course, is what monologues are all about. They're all about controlling your own identity or creating a sort of semi-fictional identity.
In Via Dolorosa, Stephen Daldry, who directed it, said, "I notice you always make yourself stupider than you are." And I said, "Well, of course I make myself a little bit stupider because I've got to be the person who doesn't understand and to whom everything is explained. If I go saying, ‘Oh, I already know this,’ I'm a very boring person.” And it's the same thing slightly with this disease. I make myself at various points probably slightly more naïve than I was in real life. But that's art. The personality of the artist is not the same as the personality of the person.
DK: Right. And when that personality comes through, happily, Audible's massive global footprint and the millions and millions of people listening as we speak was really born of the humanization of that first-person voice. And it's a private performance to the perception of people driving their cars and with earbuds close to their brains.
DH: I love that.
DK: And if they can basically feel it, it's an intimacy that has basically made Audible what it is. But speaking of that, I've also used theater over the years as I led the company to, basically—that critical vocabulary of theater is what we want. It's not a book, it's a book refracted through this artful, theatrical performance. It honors, obviously, the text, but it honors the production, the acting, and all the sophisticated nuances that come through with it.
"I think I've always loved the American audience. When you get a good play, they rise to it."
But let's talk about theater for a minute, because I remember reading that you noted in recent years what they call “pious theater,” which I think you meant so much theater that was reinforcing the audience's preexisting beliefs as opposed to challenging them. And Beat the Devil includes hilarious takes in fury and outrage over official mismanagement and the like. So, how do you sort of separate pious theater with theater that makes a point?
DH: I want to come out of the theater knowing something I didn't know when I went in. I've written plays about all sorts of apparently untheatrical subjects. I've written a play about the Chinese Revolution. I've written a play about the privatization of the railways. I've written a play about the diplomatic process leading up to the war in Iraq. And when you tell people you're writing about these subjects, they sound extremely unpromising. But I want people to go, "Oh, my goodness." I want to expand subject matter so that you can go to the theater and come out knowing a lot more than when you went in. And it is not just a factual learning, it's a learning about people and things and institutions and human behavior and all that, but it's got to bring news.
And when I attacked what I call pious theater, by pious theater I mean theater that simply reiterates what we already know. When somebody says, "We've all got to be nicer to each other" or "We've all got to give peace a chance" or "Homosexuals are people too." Or, you know, "Racism is a bad thing," I just go, "What is the point of this? I knew this when I came in, and I'm just being hit over the head with this same thing that I know already." And that's what I mean about the danger of theater becoming simply singing to the choir, simply telling people what they already know. What I've always tried to do is let the air in and open the doors and let the world blow through the theater so that it brings fresh air with it. And that's what I hope I've done.
DK: You certainly have. And I think that's really an illuminating way to look at your own work. Speaking of that, though, there is this tendency in art and entertainment to classify or force a given piece into a genre. And as I think of Beat the Devil, or your masterpiece Plenty and other works hearkening back to the ’70s, or your screenplay for The Hours, I wonder if you self-classify your own works by type or theme or even perhaps as periods, like a visual artist?
DH: No, but I like to think I avoid genre. I sort of have become aware that genre has got very boring in the arts. In other words, almost everything that I go to see that really excites me can't be classified very easily as, "Oh, it's a spy film" or "Oh, it's a romantic comedy." These genres, we're so alert to them. We've seen so many. We know their strategies. Happily ever after is not a solution that is anymore going to have the potency it had in the 1930s. We've lived with 100 years of mechanical entertainment and we know the formulae. The audience is ahead of us. And the films that I've been proudest of are the films where I've kept the audience on its toes without them being able to say, "Oh, it's one of those mafia films. Oh, it's one of those crime films. Oh, it's one of those films where everyone gets the guns out and shoots each other at the end." Trying to avoid genre, I've spent an awfully long time doing that.
DK: So, one thing I knew helping guide Audible into the lives of people all over the world, in 147 different languages, is that each culture has its own storytelling voice and performance culture. And this has proven true even for the difference between Audible US, Audible UK, Audible Australia, Audible Canada. You've always had a particularly transatlantic capacity to engage talent and audiences on both sides of the pond. How do you see the state of UK versus US theater as you bounce back and forth between the two?
"It's wrong to say you're at the mercy of your body, because your body is essentially doing its very best to survive. It wants to survive."
DH: I think I've always loved the American audience. When you get a good play, they rise to it. I can't say I've always had the same admiration for American theater producers. I was very, very lucky to be cultivated by Joe Papp at the Public Theater. And then my plays on Broadway were presented by wonderful producers of really serious plays. And their attitude has always been the more challenging the play is, the better. I've always found that when you present the American audience with something that does stretch them, they love being stretched. They adore it. So, I don't think there's that tremendous difference. In England, I'd say probably the audiences are just a little bit more sullen and complacent than they are in America. But that sharpness of reaction you get in the States is something playwrights live for, I think.
DK: Well, and we should note that Beat the Devil exists now and we're launching on Audible because I had the great privilege of being at New York's Public Theater and watching David offer up a reading of his own monologue, and luckily had got to sit next to him at dinner afterwards and put out the idea of making this recording.
DH: I’m extremely grateful that you did. It's just great for me that it's available for people all over the world to enjoy.
DK: So, one chilling moment as you reflect upon surviving the virus, but also perhaps foreshadowing the reality of long COVID in this piece, and the collective misremembering, the contagion of dissociation from fact that’s avoided what really happened during this most devastating COVID experience, you wrote, "The virus is in me and always will be." What did you mean?
DH: I think what I meant was that I suppose it brought to me a very strong consciousness that I am my body and that my body will behave in the way it chooses to behave. What I describe in the process of healing, I tried to make myself heal and contribute to the healing process. I totally failed. My body just was going to heal itself in its own way. It's wrong to say you're at the mercy of your body, because your body is essentially doing its very best to survive. It wants to survive. But the sense that you are dependent on how your body behaves, that was, I suppose, what I learned.
And it equipped me very well because it happened that, which I don't write about, but in the year after I had COVID, I had leukemia. And leukemia's not a very pleasant thing to have, as a lot of people will know. But I was sort of equipped mentally to deal with it. I knew how to deal with a serious illness because I'd already had one. And what you do is surrender to it. This whole thing about Boris Johnson saying he survived because of his tremendous fighting qualities is absolute nonsense. You just do whatever is intelligent to help your body do what it wants to do, which is survive. It wants to survive. And your job is to help it as best you can, if you can. In the case of my leukemia, that was with very amazing modern drugs, drugs which I may say have only existed for 10 years. My hematologist was saying, "You're very, very lucky. If you'd got this 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the chances of survival that you have now." But there is no doubt that my experience of COVID trained me for that and taught me to let my body do its own work.
DK: That's a great way to end. So, David, thank you.
DH: Thank you so much.
DK: It's been a pleasure speaking to you. And listeners, you can find Beat the Devil on Audible now. I highly recommend you listen to this piece.
