Stuff Happens

In Stuff Happens by Sir David Hare - a drama-documentary about the build-up to the war in Iraq - actors play Tony Blair, George Bush and other frontline politicians.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MICHAEL GOVE:
There is something intrinsically dishonest about this piece because what it seeks to do is to use words, speeches, that we all know are verifiable, the words as spoken by the real politicians, and then it interpellates conjecture in such a way as to make a particular, to my mind, transparently ideological point. It is clear that David Hare is one of our finest playwrights, it's clear that he can construct a pacey reconstruction of events, but it's also clear to me that what he sought to do at key moments is to interpellate his interpretation of events where there is no clear consensus about what may or may not have happened.

LAWSON:
Dishonest seems a strong word to me but he's clear in the programme and the text that when we go behind closed doors he's imagining, we are told that, so that is a clue we're given. Julie Myerson, what he's trying to do is clearly not Dead Ringers, although the impersonations are accurate, it isn't a polemic either, he seems to be trying to take Blair and Bush seriously, their faith, their ideas. Did it convince you?

JULIE MYERSON:
Yes, I think it does. I sort of agree with what Michael is saying but I found that fine. I didn't mind that. I think it's a very funny play, for three hours, with just men in suits and a table and some chairs, it zips by. I was completely entertained. I hoped to be illuminated on the bits I haven't really understood of the Iraq war. I kind of was, other things left me more confused. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing -it's a very complex bit of history here. I can't judge its political validity completely. But I thought it was wonderful. A really intelligent piece of writing.

TOM PAULIN:
I thought it was terrific theatre, taking the technique of The Permanent Way a stage further. It's got a sort of classical austerity, it's got great momentum, it has, as Julie says, lots of laughs in it, not just the usual titter we recognise. Some really good well-timed jokes. A brilliant one about Bush getting things wrong, which everyone laughed at very uproariously. And it's very fascinating because it's not like Dead Ringers so you feel Colin Powell: very intense characterisation there, brilliantly acted. Again, the sweaty anxious-driven Blair was terrific with the sort of ugly suit and tie and so on. That was very powerful. The actor doing Bush was very good as well. I thought that the presentation of Rumsfeld and Cheney got stronger and stronger and stronger. Wolfowitz, the ex-Trotskyite, wasn't so good, I don't think, in terms of the writing. But the sense of these people: sort of ignorant gangsters sitting about having meetings; the only problem in the staging, I think, is it's too much like Talking Heads: they're sitting in chairs too often. And you wanted them moving about the stage more. But it is a very, very powerful, brilliant piece of work.

LAWSON:
I want to explore with Michael though some of the things that Hare is speculating or alleging in this. There is a startling scene in the first act in which Tony Blair rings George Bush and says, "look, I'm very upset about this. British special forces captured Osama Bin Laden, the Americans gave the order to let him go". Pretty extraordinary thing, David Hare has insisted that he has sources for this, but it's a very strong thing to put in a documentary play.

GOVE:
Remarkably so. It was relatively widely broadcast and written about that some within the British army felt they were within an ace of capturing Osama Bin Laden and they felt that the Americans had screwed it up for them. And I don't know to what extent this was simply wounded amour-propre on the part of certain British officers, who felt perhaps rather like sportsmen who were denied the prize. What I don't believe is that the Prime Minister in the course of a conversation with the President of the United States would have engaged in a dialogue like that. That's one of the things to me that seems to undermine the authenticity of the piece overall. I suspect it served a particular ideological purpose of Hare's which was returned to at several points. He used phrases, which he attributed to Bush, which suggested that Bush was entirely unconcerned about the specific task of securing the capture of Osama Bin Laden. What I think he failed to appreciate was that from Bush's point of view, the capture of Osama Bin Laden is a great prize. What he's engaged in is a war, not the winding up of a criminal enterprise.

LAWSON:
I was most impressed about the context because he shows how all the characters came out of their reaction to Vietnam, he puts in the connection with Palestine and so on. Tom Paulin, I wonder about the balance of it. You're fairly well-known I think to be anti-war. A lot of the audience I felt were too. I thought Hare was trying to balance it, for example, there is a speech which in the text is specified to come from a British journalist, which actually puts the case for the war. It's much more balanced than I expected it to be.

PAULIN:
I think it is more balanced, and at the same time, you get polls saying that most of the British people are against the war. In fact, when it happened, it moved until they were about even, or a few more in favour of it. But I think that he is still committed to the Blair project, which actually means instead of creating a sort of stuffed dummy out of the Blair character and just pushing him about, he actually makes a character who has his own momentum, I think, and is tortured in certain ways. I know some people have objected to that. But he certainly doesn't simplify the issues, I think.

GOVE:
We mentioned Dead Ringers earlier, the one way in which I actually preferred it to this production is that Dead Ringers makes no apology, it takes the mickey out of everyone. I felt what was unfair about this production is that some characters - Colin Powell - are fully rounded, sympathetic human beings and others - Cheney and Rumsfeld - are turned into caricatures, played effectively for laughs, but nevertheless there's a form of essentially discrimination, a two-tier writing.

PAULIN:
I see; they're more than caricatures. As Cheney builds and builds in the play, you can feel this horrific Stalinist monster there, I think. And it becomes very gripping, I think. And I think that actually there's not much more you can do with Rumsfeld and Cheney. They're not complex figures like Colin Powell. They haven't been in battle like Colin Powell.

LAWSON:
I think it's unfair to invoke Dead Ringers. I thought the central performances, particularly Joe Morton as Colin Powell and also Nicholas Farrell as Tony Blair, these are quite complicated acting performances. They're giving a hint of the character, but also trying to develop it.

MYERSON:
They all seemed to have an agenda that was taking place on the stage, and I found that very impressive about the play. It's what gave it its complexity. The Dead Ringers' comparison is really unfair actually, much as I love Dead Ringers.