I once interviewed David Hare, back in 2001 when he was adapting a play by Chekhov. “I’m trying to chip the statue of the plaster saint,” he told me. “That’s what’s made Chekhov boring, this idea that he is this all-knowing seer who lived his life 5ft above the ground, looking down on humanity.”

I heartily approve of Hare’s iconoclasm, and I feel that it might profitably be directed at Hare himself. Because this idea that he is (in the words of one critic) “the nation’s moral watchdog” is doing neither Hare’s own reputation nor our theatre culture much good.

The reason for that reputation is obvious. Hare is the media’s ideal playwright. He makes good copy. He writes big intelligent articles when asked. His plays are easy to review, because they talk in a literal, discursive mode that journalists can understand.

He’s lionised by influential theatre critics, who are almost all, like him, well-educated middle-aged males who cut their theatre teeth in the 1960s and believe that plays should perform a “moral watchdog” function; that they should say something civilising about society, while offering up their arguments for dissection like bodies on a slab; that they should be essentially literary artefacts, in the great (ie, hoary, old) British theatrical tradition.

The other reason for Hare’s untouchable reputation is that he is, by his own admission, an insecure and prickly character who intimidates critics. One eminent director told me: “People won’t say anything against him because they are afraid of him.” Hare has been known to phone reviewers before breakfast to contest bad notices. And famously, when the National Theatre refused to extend the run of his 2004 Iraq docu-drama Stuff Happens, he threw a monumental strop, which lasted (he said in a recent interview) for one whole “very bleak” year.

Small wonder that people prefer not to bury but to praise him. But that has led to a reputation out of kilter with his recent achievement.

I’m happy to accept him, alongside Stoppard, as the West End’s boulevardier of choice. He’s a 59-year-old man who writes plays amenable to theatre’s biggest constituency — his own age group. Plays that offer a brisk intellectual workout without straining anyone. Plays that advertise their own statesmanlike seriousness. Plays with lots and lots of words.

Witness Amy’s View, currently at the Garrick, in which every character is precisely as articulate and reasonable as David Hare, and to which my reaction, like that of the play’s antagonist Dominic, is “I’m swamped in this bloody English gentility!”

But Hare’s reputation doesn’t stop there. One American magazine, promoting his new play on Broadway, The Vertical Hour, recently called him “the greatest dramatic interpreter of 9/11 and the war in Iraq” — which will be news to those of us who sat through Stuff Happens, and even more so to those who have also seen Henry Adam’s The People Next Door, or Christopher Shinn’s Dying City, or Simon Stephens’s Motortown.

Hare’s recent achievement, rather, has been one of opportunism. He rightly identified that verbatim drama, as pioneered in London by the tribunal plays of the Tricycle Theatre, was dynamically reinventing political theatre. So Hare hijacked the bandwagon — and steered it off course. His first verbatim effort, The Permanent Way, a provocative piece edited together from interviews with the victims of the Potters Bar rail crash, ran into trouble for perceived political bias. But that was nothing next to Stuff Happens, in which Hare spliced real-life episodes from the Iraq imbroglio with speculative scenes from his own imagination.

At the expense of verbatim theatre’s hard-won authority, Hare inserted himself visibly into the drama. And for what? Stuff Happens was an unenlightening cuttings-job on the machinations leading to war (“three more hours of stuff we’ve had enough of already,” as I wrote at the time), plus some made-up bits promoting Colin Powell as a man of integrity, and George W. Bush as the brains behind the operation. History, it need hardly be added, has since made a mockery of both characterisations.

What Stuff Happens wasn’t, and what Hare’s work isn’t, is particularly left-wing. His radicalism is a misperception propagated by Hare-baiting reactionaries, and by the man himself. Notwithstanding the knighthood and the 20-year affiliation with the National Theatre, Hare still considers himself an anti-establishment figure: “My plays are very near the knuckle,” he told The Times last month. In another recent interview, discussing Stuff Happens, he claims that “my theory” that “the Iraq invasion was dreamt up by an opportunistic group in the White House who were simply exploiting 9/11 in the most cynical way” was at the time “a very controversial point of view”. Was it controversial? Wasn’t it, in the UK at least, the orthodoxy?

In any event, by the end of Stuff Happens we haven’t been spun a lefty line, we’ve been addled by Hare’s scrupulous even-handedness. He is a latter-day George Bernard Shaw, able to argue so eloquently for both sides that his plays take no position whatsoever. It looks as if audiences can expect the same from The Vertical Hour, which, judging from Hare’s promotional interviews, dramatises the arguments surrounding Iraq by having two characters argue about Iraq.