David Hare has said the UK government needs to “own up to their mistakes, stop dodging and waffling and start to trust us with the truth”, while giving his own damning verdict of its handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

The playwright and director – who is arguably the most celebrated living stage writer in the UK – has recently recovered from the virus. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the government’s handling of the situation is worse than the Suez crisis or the Iraq war.

Hare said: “To watch a weasel-worded parade of ministers shirking responsibility for their failures and confecting non-apologies to the dead and dying has seen British public life sink as low as I can remember in my entire lifetime.”

The playwright, who has had a 50-year career in theatre – writing plays including Plenty, Racing Demon and Stuff Happens – said that “in return for lockdown, isolation, commercial disaster and social distancing” the British public deserves honesty.

“They must own up to their mistakes, stop dodging and waffling and start to trust us with the truth,” he continued.

Hare spoke about what it was like to have the virus, which he said would evolve rapidly and unpredictably. “One day it would be fever, next day it would be arctic cold, then it would be vomiting, then coughing, then conjunctivitis, then breathing problems,” he said. “Day 10 was five times worse than day five.”

He dismissed those who claimed that “courage and love of life” had seen Boris Johnson through his coronavirus illness. “Those of us who’ve had the virus know you don’t under any circumstances ignore it,” he said. “What helped me survive were pure luck and the assiduous expert care of my first-class GP. Those two things only, not my fabled resources of character.”

Hare has been an outspoken critic of the Conservative party since the 1970s and in 2016 wrote a Guardian long read which argued that Thatcher and her heirs had created a selfish and divided society in which politicians and the people regard each other with mutual contempt.

Hare also criticised austerity while praising doctors and nurses who have been “nobly putting their grievances behind them” to care for the sick. He also called for more research so that the Covid-19 virus is understood. “Unless we seek not just to treat the virus’s symptoms but to understand its hold and spread we are doomed to fail,” he said.