Produced for the newly established Greenpoint Films during 1984, Wetherby marked Hare's directorial debut in the cinema. At the age of 38, a man who once claimed to have gone into the theatre as a substitute for working in the movies achieved an ambition and was set to join the ranks of England's auteurs. In weaving together the historical concerns of Hare's earlier work with the unravelling of a psychological thriller, Wetherby reveals him not as a Romantic optimist with visions of Utopia, but as a pessimist with ultimately metaphysical concerns. The film had a twelve-month theatrical release before screening on Channel Four on 12 June 1986.

An inspector calls

As the credits roll over a black screen at the beginning of Wetherby, a conversation between two unidentified voices is reminding the audience of Nixon the liar/lawyer of Watergate and placing the coming events against a background of massive political corruption. It is only as the blackout is lifted that the camera focuses on Jean Travers (Vanessa Redgrave) and the first attributable line – the second opening of the film – comes from Stanley Pilborough (Ian Holm).

The Nixon they are discussing represents not the public face of scandal but its private face – the bizarre nature of the courtship of his wife Pat. The subject of the film is not lying on the grand scale of Watergate or of Poulson, but the distortions of story-telling and the daily inveterate lying of the ordinary contemporary lives of a small Yorkshire town.