David Hare’s latest political drama is, in his own words, "a history play which happens to center on recent history; " the play outlines the political events of the last two years which led up to the war in Iraq and its aftermath. The main characters are the real life members of the Bush administration in the USA and Tony Blair’s Labor government in the UK. Hare presents a satirical and highly critical view of their actions, motivations and words and, as the majority of their lines are in their own words, it could be argued that the political figures in the play indict themselves by what they say – as Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector, has commented on seeing the play.
    Understandably, then, the play is highly controversial and therefore highly popular. Hare’s text, with its blatant left wing bias, is, nevertheless, preaching mainly to the converted among the full audiences which the play is drawing. However despite this bias, as with all true satire, Hare does point some valuable and horrific lessons from recent world events and with this play the seventy-year-old socialist emerges as a political moralist.
    The play’s dramatic impact lies in the immediacy of the events it re-enacts: the audience is constantly intrigued to see how these events will be presented on stage. Hare creates an effective and efficient synthesis of the events and wittily juxtaposes speeches, sound bites, headlines and political analysis. Although the audience has heard most of it before, the fact that the speeches of Bush, Blair, et. al. are directly addressed to the audience and therefore live rather than in a television news bulletin gives them a real potency. The inappropriateness and crassness of some of these speeches comes through loud and clear – summed up by the title of the play, Stuff Happens, which was Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s insensitive comment on the chaos of post-war Iraq.
    The play possesses a further dramatic piquancy in that the audience can see actors playing real-life contemporary political figures on stage. Not all the cast members opt for impersonation but Alex Jennings as George Bush and Nicholas Farrell as Tony Blair turn in well observed characterizations as do Ewan Hooper as Hans Blix (the chief UN weapons inspector), Ina Mitchell (as Jack Straw, Blair’s Foreign Secretary) and Adjoa Andoh as a cool Condoleeza Rice (Bush’s National Security Adviser). Equally impressive are Desmond Barrit as a powerfully menacing Dick Cheney (Bush’s Vice President); Joe Morton as a heroic Colin Powell (US Secretary of State) and Ian Gelder and Dermot Crowley (as the manipulative Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld of the U.S. Defense Department).
    Nicholas Hytner’s production is equally as efficient as Hare’s synthesis. The company remain on stage on elegant chairs at each side of the stage throughout the play wearing the political uniform of smart suits. A large long table in the center is used for the numerous meetings and dinners where decisions are made. Numerous narrators re-tell the headlines and comments. Speeches are made from the obligatory clear glass lectern. The relentless flow of meetings and discussions towards the war is chillingly swift. The company is uniformly excellent in delivering complex political arguments and the dense volume of information.
    Where the play falls down is that there is too much information – familiar though it is. For, though the play is engrossing - and the passionate soliloquies which punctuate the action help – it is very demanding on the audience’s concentration, especially as it runs for over three hours. As a result of this continual flow of information and political discussion, some critics have pronounced the play boring (at least in parts) but it is more a case of audience minds reaching saturation point at times. There is, quite simply, too much to take in and as Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist has stated, "the play takes us only where we have been before, over and over." As we sometimes switch off a newscast we have already heard earlier in the day, so too with this play.
    What the audience really wants to see is what Hare himself calls in his program note the scenes "when the doors close on the world’s leaders." This is where the author comes into his own and where the play really has dramatic life. Most notable are scenes of Blair and Bush’s sterile bonhomie at camp David; chillingly, the casual meetings of Bush’s administration when plans to invade Iraq are coolly discussed; Colin Powell’s impassioned speech to Bush in an attempt to halt the rollercoaster of war and, most controversially, the scene in Downing Street in September, 2002 where Blair deliberately decides to accept the "flawed" intelligence dossier indicating an imminent attack on UK interests by Iraq so as to press the case for going to war.
    Less information through narration and more through dramatic dialogue would therefore make the play more powerful. In covering such an expanse of material, there is little depth. As Polly Toynbee also comments, there is little attempt to get into the minds of the two main protagonists Blair and Bush. In his program note, Hare states that "this surely is a play and not a documentary" but the excessive weight of information and narration in the play makes this debatable.
    However, the real dramatic weakness in the play lies in its focus on the Bush administration. Though the war was initiated from Washington, there is little inherent dramatic tension in those scenes as there appears to have been little debate in Bush’s circle about invading Iraq. Another flaw is that the dramatic action lacks a clear resolution as the carnage in Iraq continues. In what is the most moving and powerful moment in the play – its Epilogue, Raad Rawr, as an Iraqi exile, gives an impassioned soliloquy in which Hare observes that while there are accurate figures for casualties of each coalition nation serving in Iraq, no one is counting the toll of the thousands of Iraqi dead. It is this speech which highlights the themes which underlie the sweep of events on stage: the immorality of the Iraq conflict and its aftermath and the obscenity of War in general.
    Though flawed, and whether you agree with the point of view or not, this is an important and thought-provoking piece of theatre through which David Hare points some disturbing lessons he has wrought from the chaos of our times.