All the world's leaders crowd the stage -- The Iraq War in the theatre

[HuckleB]

All the world's leaders crowd the stage

James Meek gets a preview of David Hare's take on the Iraq war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1295575,00.html

"On the north bank of the choppy Thames, the grand citadels of Britain's state power stood high, illuminated and mostly deserted: the Ministry of Defence, Parliament. Opposite, on the South Bank, those who have walked those corridors trod a circular stage in a different arena, with a different kind of power: Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Alastair Campbell, Geoff Hoon.

George W Bush was there, and Laura Bush, and Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz; there was George Tenet, and John McCain, and Trevor McDonald and Robin Cook. Even Saddam Hussein, speaking Arabic, put in an appearance among the cast of characters we have come to think, through television, that we know so well, yet trust so little.

Whatever the critics might say about Stuff Happens, David Hare's much anticipated new play at the National Theatre about the politicking behind the inva sion of Iraq, he cannot be accused of skimping on characters. Besides the above mentioned on the often crowded stage of yesterday's preview performance, actors stepped forth in the roles of Philip Bassett, special adviser to the prime minister, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, aide to the French president Jacques Chirac, and for a brief moment, Ricardo Lagos, president of Chile.

Stuff Happens is the latest and most ambitious of the recent series of docu-plays which have stretched the boundaries playwrights and producers have considered possible on the London stage. Dramas like Hare's own The Permanent Way and Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain's Guantanamo are part journalism, part imagined or reconstructed speech from known or surmised meetings, part polemic.

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