A new war is being waged on the Iraqi conflict and Western politics - butthis time it is in the theatre, writes Lara Marlowe.
George W. Bush and Tony Blair walk alone on the grounds of Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. The invasion of Iraq is months away, but Blair already faces resistance from a wary British parliament and public.
Bush brushes aside the prime minister's worries about the Israeli-Palestininian conflict. Iraq is "moving up the agenda", Bush tells him. Blair gingerly broaches the subject of his problems back home. "I'm going through one of those periods - you haven't had one yet - when political problems come together," he tells Bush. "Give me an example," the president requests.
"Well, for example, I know it sounds silly," Blair confesses, "but foxhunting." The audience at London's National Theatre explodes in laughter, perhaps the only moment in David Hare's three-hour play Stuff Happens when the British laugh at themselves instead of the Yanks.
Though Stuff Happens is a meticulous recreation of the conniving that led to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the unequal relationship between the US and Britain is perhaps its strongest theme. The play "brings back the reality that Tony Blair took Britain into the war primarily to preserve his status as the closest ally of whoever is in the White House," wrote former foreign secretary Robin Cook (who resigned the day before the war started) in the Guardian.
Stuff Happens has been called the cultural event of the season, and the National's Olivier Theatre - capacity 1,160 - is full every night. Its success is part of a broader resurgence of political theatre inspired by the Bush administration and the Iraq war.
Other recent successes include Embedded by the US actor Tim Robbins; Justifying War, based on the Hutton inquiry, by journalist Richard Norton-Taylor; The Madness of George Dubya, by Justin Butcher; and Guantanamo: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom", by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo.
Iraq, says Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, "is the great issue of the time. It was inevitable that it would become a topic for theatrical discussion." Hytner took over at the National Theatre in April 2003, the month that Saddam Hussein fell. He immediately put on Shakespeare's Henry V.
"It's about a young British leader invading a foreign country with a very slender justification in law," says Hytner. "The entire first act shows how a justification is cooked up for a foreign adventure that has very little going for it, save for his desire to undertake it. As soon as you perform one of these plays in modern dress, the parallels become blindingly obvious."
Richard Norton-Taylor, a correspondent for the Guardian, began writing what he calls "tribunal plays" for Nicolas Kent, director of The Tricycle Theatre, a decade ago. Their first project, Half the Picture - the Scott Arms to Iraq Inquiry, showed how civil servants and cabinet ministers dissembled weapons shipments to Iraq. The title is from Lord Butler, who said: "Half the picture can be true."
"In other words, you don't have to give parliament and the public the whole picture," Norton-Taylor explains. Acclaim for Half the Picture encouraged him to write five more plays drawn from verbatim records.
Victoria Brittain, who spent 20 years at the Guardian and is now a research associate at the London School of Economics, was amazed by the success of Guantanamo, which she co-wrote last spring with the South African novelist Gillian Slovo.
"The subtitle, Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, is the slogan above the gate where the prisoners arrive," she explains. "Its true impact is the echo of the sign 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (work brings freedom) at Auschwitz."
Like Norton-Taylor's plays, Guantanamo was Nicolas Kent's brainchild. Because there were no court records to go by, Brittain and Slovo interviewed the relatives of Guantanamo detainees and two released prisoners.
No US or British official would give them an interview, so Brittain and Slovo used comments from a press conference by Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about the morality of imprisoning men in chain-link cages, the US defence secretary replied: "To be in an eight-by-eight cell in beautiful, sunny Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is not an inhumane treatment. And it has a roof." Brittain thought Guantanamo "would be a little lefty play that would last three weeks". To her amazement, it received rave reviews, moved to the West End for four months and then on to the Bleecker Street Theater in New York for an open-ended run.
BRITTAIN ATTRIBUTES THE revival of political theatre to "the intensity of the political moment and the absolutely unsatisfactory relations between those in power and ordinary people". The public, she adds, "feel the need for something more heavyweight, more dramatic, to satisfy what's swirling around in their heads. People are agitated and frightened and they don't know what of. They don't believe anything their leaders tell them."
The documentary style invented by Kent has blurred the lines between journalism and theatre. Watching Norton-Taylor's "tribunal plays" or Guantanamo, the theatre-goer knows that every word is true. "It's very satisfying for a journalist to watch an audience getting the full picture and responding," says Norton-Taylor. He has taken a sabbatical to complete a play about Bloody Sunday, which will be performed at The Tricycle next spring.
"Everyone knows the general theme of Bloody Sunday ad nauseum," Norton-Taylor continues. "A lot of the evidence concerns the world of the soldiers. For example one says: 'I shot 19 rounds into a frosty lavatory window'. The detail is interesting and dramatic, and it's something you can't do as a journalist, even in a 3000-word article. I'm trying to be more subtle than just attacking the British army, to show the reasons why they did what they did. It wouldn't work on film. Everything is in the words."
David Hare, the writer of Stuff Happens, has long used a combination of journalistic technique and writer's licence. In Stuff Happens, he mixes real quotes with his imagined version of politicians' private conversations. Rumsfeld's comment about looters and arsonists in Baghdad gave him the title. "Think what's happened in our cities when we've had riots, and problems, and looting," Rumsfeld said. "Stuff happens . . . and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
The accretion of well-known quotes at times makes Stuff Happens feel like a clippings job. The best moments are imagined - Tony Blair's sheepishness over his foxhunting problem; the then French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin chiding Colin Powell at lunch at the Plaza. "Some of us find it hard to believe you're now getting wholeheartedly behind the idea of international law," Villepin tells the US secretary of state. "I think the world outside America has felt a little like a rejected lover these past two years. Now it's one o'clock in the morning and you're coming to our door with a bunch of flowers and whisky on your breath. You can see why some of us are feeling just a little bit cautious."
With the exception of Embedded, which played for a year in Los Angeles and New York before coming to London, political theatre seems to be a British phenomenon. Despite some off-Broadway efforts, including a soon-to-open play by Sam Shepherd about the Republican Party, political theatre "cannot be prominent (in the US) because the objective of Broadway is to make money," says Hytner of the National Theatre.
Members of The Actors' Gang - the US troupe that brought Embedded to London - say British audiences are fundamentally different from those they performed for in the US. "America has a problem with literacy," says Andrew Wheeler, who plays the neo-conservative Richard Perle as well as an embedded journalist in the play. "It doesn't mean we can't read; it's a question of context. You get a different perspective from a society with multiple sources of news, that reads more."
Stuff Happens and Embedded take different approaches to the Iraq war. David Hare is almost coy about what he has called "a conflict whose meaning eludes us". He presents all the arguments, for and against, then allows the evidence to mount.
"It's manipulative the way all good storytelling is," says director Hytner. "Its arguments are clear: that the primary motivation for the war was an unfettered exercise of American power by an administration partially under the control of neo-conservatives who had a disastrously arrogant and ill-thought out notion of the consequences."
Embedded makes no pretence of neutrality. The actor and author Tim Robbins was one of a handful of US entertainers, along with his wife Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Danny Glover and Mike Farrell, who spoke out before the invasion of Iraq. "At the time, especially in the context of 9/11, that kind of dissent was really frowned upon," says actor V.J. Foster, who plays the two most objectionable characters in Embedded. "People were saying: 'What's wrong with you?', 'you're un-American' or 'you're on the side of the terrorists.'" Right-wing talk show hosts urged Americans to boycott films starring pacifist actors.
Embedded is brash, with loud music and some very crude satire. A coven of six neo-conservatives, who worship their late guru, Leo Strauss, convene on stage in suits, ties and the face masks that are the trademark of The Actors' Gang. They find the idea of war so exciting that they simulate masturbation and orgasms on stage.
But then Embedded surprises you. Parts of the play are genuinely moving - the farewell embraces of wives and soldiers, the letters they write to each other. Unlike anti-war activists of the Vietnam era, American opponents of the Iraq war no longer treat enlisted men as "baby-killers". In Robbins's play, the colonel responsible for the "embeds" is the only unpleasant soldier.
The Pentagon transformed the ordeal of Private Jessica Lynch into propaganda. Embedded tells the true story, with the Lynch character sobbing in her hospital bed, telling her parents how she saw her best friends die around her.
A black soldier aims his assault rifle at the audience as he delivers his panicked monologue, then fires, wiping out an Iraqi family. Though the bullets are blanks, the experience is almost as frightening as approaching a US checkpoint in Iraq.
Nor are all of the journalists in Embedded are a disgrace to the profession. John Simpson's live report of a US bombing raid on a friendly convoy is performed powerfully by Adele Robbins. She also recites Alan Feuer's account in the New York Times of Iraqi civilians burying relatives who were killed in the US onslaught.
THE TWO PLAYS convey opposing views of George W. Bush. Nicholas Hytner of the National Theatre believes that Alex Jennings' performance as a shrewd, calculating Bush "is the great revelation" of Stuff Happens. "Bush is popularly perceived in this country as a buffoon," he explains. "He is not a buffoon."
Bush does not even appear onstage in Embedded, because the masked neo-conservatives are really running the country. "They just wind him up and he does what they want," explains actor Andrew Wheeler. "Bush is meat for the dog to chew on while the house is being robbed." Both plays mock Bush's "Mission Accomplished" performance on a US aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego in May 2003. This time, Stuff Happens beats Embedded for crude satire. "Thanks to an artful arrangement of jumpsuit groin-straps, George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States, shows his balls to the world," a narrator announces.
Stuff Happens has the merit of reminding us how British troops nearly caught Osama Bin Laden in 2001, but were called off by Washington because the Americans wanted the glory. We'd forgotten that Bush and Blair ignored 100 million protestors who marched in 600 cities on February 15th , 2003, and that the US deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz promised Iraq could finance its own reconstruction.
Stuff Happens creates none of the sharp shocks of Embedded, but by the end of the play, the audience smoulders at deceitful politicians. For a few minutes, or a few hours, you wonder why the US and Britain are not on the brink of revolution.