I find our attitude to David Hare very odd. He writes good plays. He has a loyal public. He addresses contemporary issues. Yet, increasingly, his work seems to attract the wrath of the “commentariat” – not so much the critics as that vast body of men and women who have space to fill in weekly columns. It occurred with his excellent play about Iraq, Stuff Happens. It’s happened again with Gethsemane, his fascinating new play at the National Theatre which refers obliquely to recent scandals but which is really about New Labour’s lack of Utopian vision.

The play itself got mixed overnight reviews, which is fair enough, but what fascinated me was the rash of columnitis that followed. Ian Jack in the Guardian told us that it wasn’t “a play for today”. David Lister took the same tack in the Independent, informing us that plays like Hare’s “can all too rapidly become rather last season”. And Dominic Cavendish, who is at least a critic, went further in the Daily Telegraph, suggesting that Gethsemane was proof of theatre’s recent ineffectualness as “a podium for oppositional thought”. To all of which my main reaction is a polite raspberry.

For a start, most people got Hare’s play wrong. Although it makes glancing reference to private problems afflicting Labour ministers, it is really about something far more serious – the reduction of government to a form of managerial pragmatism rather than an instrument of change. It’s also about the difficulty of governing well when the press behaves like a pack of scalp hunters. Even the admirers, myself included, missed a key point: it is an optimistic play arguing that, just as Christ overcame his night of doubt at Gethsemane, so those on the Left need to keep the faith in dark times.

To argue that Gethsemane is already dated because it deals with the Blair years strikes me as plain dotty. It’s rather like saying Granville Barker’s Waste is irrelevant because Herbert Asquith is dead, or that Ghosts is past its sell-by date because syphilis is now curable. I’m not saying Hare’s play is as good as either of those. But it tackles a living issue – the creeping corrosion of our political culture. It will also, I suspect, gain stature with time. Hare’s The Absence of War was pooh-poohed on its first appearance in 1993. It now looks like a highly prophetic play in which Labour, after four election defeats, decides that the only way back to power is to become more like the Tories.

What really intrigues me, however, is why Hare attracts such animus. It can’t just be the plays themselves, which unless I’m missing something, have the capacity of a John le Carre or Graham Greene novel to combine a suspense-filled plot with a political or philosophical idea. Is it perhaps something in Hare’s combative nature and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly that offends our scribes and pharisees? One hopes not.

My own suspicion is that Hare irritates columnar opinion-makers because he dares to trespass on their own ground. He writes about cultural relativism (Amy’s View), the disastrous effects of railway privatisation (The Permanent Way), the origins of the Iraq War (Stuff Happens) and now, in Gethsemane, the decay of political vision. These weighty matters are regarded as the province of the pundits rather than a mere dramatist. But, in airing them on public stages, Hare has done more than anyone in my lifetime to bring the British theatre into contact with society. Far from being “Hare today, gone tomorrow”, the best of his work will, I suspect, endure.

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