AVOIDING THE TRAP OF COHERENCE:

Stuff Happens (Michael Billington, September 11, 2004, The Guardian)

David Hare's Stuff Happens has already become a chewed-over public event. But, after attending its Olivier press night, it also strikes me as a very good, totally compelling play: one that may not contain a vast amount of new information but that traces the origins of the Iraq war, puts it in perspective and at the same time astutely analyses the American body politic.

[H]are avoids the trap of agitprop by cannily subverting the play's anti-war bias. You see this most powerfully in a speech, credited to a journalist, that questions our tendency to view Iraq from a local political viewpoint. "From what height of luxury and excess," says the character, "we look down to condemn the exact style in which even a little was given to those who had nothing."

Hare, in fact, constantly creates a form of internal dialectic. The play ruthlessly exposes the dubious premises on which the war was fought. At the same time, it questions our complacency by reminding us of the pro-war arguments. A New Labour politician - possibly not a million miles from Ann Clwyd - admits that the supposed weapons turned out not to exist and that a military victory was compromised by sloppy Pentagon planning for peace. "At the same time," she argues, "a dictator was removed."

Hare's other key means of creating conflict is to view Colin Powell as a stern realist in a Bush war cabinet made up of deluded fantasists. In a big showdown with Bush, based on documented facts, Powell passionately presses the case for treating war as a last resort after diplomacy has been exhausted. In the play's best line, he points out the hypocrisy of American attitudes. "People keep asking," he says of Saddam, "how do we know he's got weapons of mass destruction? How do we know? Because we've still got the receipts."

Can anyone follow that? We have to be careful not to "condemn the exact style in which even a little was given to those who had nothing." Yet the removal of one of the world's most vicious dictators is an afterthought? And the WMD didn't ever exist but we should be chastened because we sold it to him? What the...

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 11, 2004 8:29 PM