David Hare’s notebook: The National Theatre belongs to taxpayers, not corporate sponsors

The nicest day of the year was spent at Charleston in May. The Sussex farmhouse shared by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell looked splendid in the streaming sunshine. As a dramatist, I’ve idly disparaged bald and white-haired audiences. But as soon as I started speaking at the literary festival, I realised that everyone in panama hats and cardigans was way to the left of me. The first question was about my local childhood, and I said that growing up so close to the Channel meant that stories of people like Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf sitting on English lawns and hearing the sound of battle in the first world war from across the water had always moved me. When I added that you couldn’t be born in Sussex without feeling profoundly European — and that a historical hostility to Europe therefore mystified me — I was cheered to the rafters.