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"I am Fatboy and I demand the right to rule the world!" The rush of drama satirising the US and UK's decision to send their armies to fight in Iraq is not subtle: it claims to be too engaged, and too enraged, for that. But it is also too popular to care: Fatboy, a satire on American greed, ran throughout August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was full most nights, and got lots of laughs and cheers at the end.
Embedded, by the actor and director Tim Robbins, opened at London's River-side Theatre at the end of last month. And Stuff Happens, a play about the American administration's march to war that borrows for its title Donald Rumsfeld's phrase about the looting of Baghdad, premiered last week. This is not an alternative fringe event - it is written by Sir David Hare, a doyen of British theatre. And it is being produced by the National Theatre, which receives £12.5m in public funding a year.
Stuff Happens represents the revival of political theatre. Everywhere you look, British playwrights are talking politics. Last year, north London's Tricycle Theatre staged Justifying War, which dramatised the Hutton Inquiry before it had submitted a word of its report, and this year its Guantanamo transferred so successfully to London's West End that a US version has opened at New York's Bleecker Street Theatre.
During the attack on Iraq in 2003, Warcrime, David Williams's play about civilian casualties, opened in the crypt of St Andrew's Church in London, and Justin Butcher's The Madness of George Dubya transferred from a London fringe theatre to the Arts Theatre in the West End. Subtitled Strangelove Revisited, this heavy-handed example of America-bashing showed Bush and Blair leading the west to Armageddon - proving how easily laughable exaggeration can be passed off as political satire.
Britain also hosted American satirists such as San Francisco's Riot Group, which performed Adriano Shaplin's Pugilist Specialist at last year's Edinburgh Fringe - and on air on BBC Radio 4. Here, a unit of marines go after an Arab leader nicknamed "Big Stache", and in the process acquire awareness of their "manifest destiny". As one of them says, "They either love us or they love to hate us - either way, we're spreading love." Also in Edinburgh was Capital by Australian Vanessa Badham. She showed two sinister American publicists explaining away evidence of US marines killing patients in an Iraqi hospital.
Throughout the summer of 2003, subsidised theatres such as London's Royal Court and the National raised their voices in anti-war protest. War Correspondence, at the Royal Court, was a series of events that included poems by Tony Harrison and short documentary-style pieces by playwrights Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp. On Friday afternoons, the National staged Collateral Damage, a series of events in which various artists - from actress Judi Dench to cartoonist Ralph Steadman - made their feelings plain.
Nor was opera immune to anti-war fever. At Glyndebourne, American director Peter Sellars caused a stink by kitting out Mozart's Idomeneo in military fatigues. A production of Beethoven's Fidelio at Florence's Maggio Musicale last year saw the prisoner, Florestan, liberated by blue-helmeted UN troops, while an egregious Don Fernando, the minister, announced liberation in a narcissistic TV interview. And composer Keith Burstein has written Manifest Destiny, a new opera about a young Muslim student turned terrorist who ends up in Guantanamo.
This is just a small selection of the art that takes war to task. Only one that I know of gave a voice to one of the reasons for the war: the oppression of the Iraqi people. It was Nine Parts of Desire, a 2003 monologue by the Iraqi-American Heather Raffo, which explored the lives of women under Saddam Hussein's rule, and which played in Edinburgh and at London's Bush Theatre.
British theatre leads the world in political drama, but at the moment all the plays say the same thing. In the words of The Times columnist Stephen Pollard, plays inspired by September 11 "range from attacking Bush and Blair for being stupid to attacking them for being evil". The odd thing about this liberal consensus is that no one questions it. Whenever you ask one of British theatre's leading players about it, the reply is tinged with an aggrieved surprise that soon escalates into outright irritation.
David Hare didn't give any interviews before Stuff Happens opened, and even the play's director (and head of the National Theatre), Nicholas Hytner, was fairly curt: "I can't say much about the play, except that it would be wrong to call it a docu-drama. Firstly, it is a play; it is not a verbatim report. Secondly, it is sober; it is not a satire, nor a partisan knockabout." So far, so good.
What does Hytner think about the liberal consensus? He's in denial: "I think there's a sceptical consensus in British theatre, not a liberal one. The point is not whether it's liberal or conservative, Labour or Tory, Republican or Democrat, but that theatre has always found ways of challenging authority - a theatre that celebrates the status quo becomes pageant. We're not journalists. We present everything not as fact or reportage but as material to be argued or disagreed with. We do not pretend to be presenting objective truth. There's a lot of nonsense spoken about the absence of rightwing voices in theatre."
As evidence, he cites Tom Stoppard's 2002 trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, "that was explicitly sceptical of the leftwing utopian ideal", and Alan Bennett's The History Boys, currently at the National, which "is rather conservative with a small c". Hytner says there is no drama unless opposing positions are convincingly embodied: "I think I can say this about Stuff Happens - it simply wouldn't be a play unless you could see where George Bush was coming from. The fact the writer, who controls the discussion, is edging it towards a position that is sceptical of the establishment is to be expected. It's what they do." He has no problem with heading a state-funded institution while criticising the government. "It's not the government that subsidises us. It's the taxpayer. We have no responsibility towards the government - our responsibility is to the people who buy the tickets."
Stuff Happens is not an isolated case. Last year, Hytner began his first season at the National with Shakespeare's Henry V. Dumping doublet and hose in favour of combat fatigues and sharp suits, it used a host of contemporary references, from TV news bulletins to drunken squaddies, in order to pump home its anti-war message. The main problem with such a one-sided reading of Shakespeare is that the bard's richness of allusion is lost - where normally audiences can hear a variety of resonant meanings, such partial versions offer only one.
Across the river from the National, Guantanamo at the New Ambassadors Theatre is a verbatim drama put together from interviews with relatives and friends of Camp X-Ray's British detainees, by journalist Victoria Brittain and novelist Gillian Slovo. Although there is no prize for guessing which point of view the play takes, Slovo says she attempted to balance it. "We tried to talk to all sides but both the British and American governments did not make themselves available. The Americans are not interested in talking to people who are opposed to the war and the British government is friendly but embarrassed. I suspect that they really don't believe that Guantanamo is a good thing."
Slovo sees the rise in political drama as a result not only of September 11, but also because "people feel very strongly that their voices aren't being heard". She thinks that the liberal consensus is a good thing. "I think government has quite a monopoly on being able to get its point across, particularly in America. The New York Times had to apologise twice to its readers for its blind support of Bush [in fact, the New York Times published one critique of its coverage of the evidence of weapons of mass destruction, saying it relied too much on unverifiable testimony]. Theatre traditionally is a counter-voice, and political theatre has traditionally questioned the status quo."
Slovo says that no one has called her play one-sided, but admits that some people have asked: "What happens if the people you represent in your play are guilty? My answer to that is that the play doesn't say whether they are guilty or innocent because nobody has formally accused them of anything yet. They are being held illegally."
But does political drama have to be factual? Like Hare, David Edgar is a veteran of political theatre. Recently, he staged Continental Divide - two epics about American politics that examined, in an even-handed way, both Democratic and Republican party politics. He says, "I call what I do faction - fiction based on facts that have happened more than once, say a peace process or the peaceful eastern European revolutions. Journalism tells you what's happening; history tells you what happened; drama tells you what happens. This avoids the central problem of documentary drama, which is summed up by the question: I wonder if that is really true? Faction allows you to present a whole thesis without worrying about gaps in the record or whether these things happened exactly as shown."
In general, he argues, "The desire for theatre as journalism comes from a widespread sense that fiction can't comprehend the enormity of what's going on. Why is theatre doing journalism? Because TV journalism is crushed under the tank tracks of the fad for reality TV. Theatre is small, it's cheap (compared with TV and film) and it's able to preserve an oppositional space, which we need."
American theatre has also responded rapidly to the moment. In an article for The New York Times in March 2003, Bruce Webber listed several plays that registered "alarm at the nation's ever more conservative and imperialist drift". These works included Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues, Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, Lanford Wilson's Book of Days, John Patrick Shanley's Dirty Story and A.R. Gurney's O Jerusalem. "The theatre of protest is alive and well," concluded Webber.
The American play that has received the most attention - because of its director - is Tim Robbins' Embedded, a series of sketches by the Actors Gang, a group Robbins founded in 1981 - long before he became a star. Robbins has taken one of the earliest and most public stances against the war on Iraq, and he has paid a price for it: he received lots of hate mail, and Bull Durham, a 1988 film about baseball in which he starred, was boycotted by the Baseball Hall of Fame (although the organisation's president later apologised).
In a speech given to the National Press Club in Washington last April, Robbins lectured the journalists (to their applause) that "any instance of intimidation to free speech should be battled against. Any acquiescence or intimidation at this point will only lead to more intimidation. You have, whether you like it or not, an awesome responsibility and an awesome power: the fate of discourse, the health of this republic, is in your hands, whether you write on the right or the left. This is your time, and the destiny you have chosen."
Embedded is agitprop, and it isn't any more subtle than anything else seen so far in its genre. It centres on a group of evil-minded villains with names such as Gondola, Rum-Rum and Pearly White, who indulge in Satanic-mass worship of the neo-Conservative philosopher Leo Strauss and become sexually excited only by power itself. Although his speech urged journalists to assume their "awesome responsibility", the play assumes that many have shirked it: it is fiercely critical of those journalists who were "embedded" with the US and UK troops, assuming that they were mere propagandists for their armed forces. The New York Times noted the danger of preaching to the converted: "Audience members already in sympathy with Mr Robbins' political views - the folks, in other words, most likely to attend Embedded - will quite possibly go from nodding in agreement to simply nodding off."
Since the Iraq war, classics have also assumed a khaki tinge. The two most pertinent anti-war plays have been The Persians, by Aeschylus, and Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, a new adaptation of which by David Lee Jiranek played at New York's Jean Cocteau Repertory in 2003. Other updated classics include director Judith Swift's Julius Caesar, which drew parallels between the Bush administration and the Romans, while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, director Robert Woodruff equated America's national troubles with the tragedy of Oedipus. Finally, California's Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, inspired to "do something" by Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, offered free admission to their revival of Sarah Kane's Blasted in August to any person registering to vote in the presidential election in the lobby prior to the show.
While theatre in the English-speaking world has been quick on its feet, its continental counterparts have lumbered. In France, theatre remains aloof from politics. One exception is Michel Vinaver, whose 11 September 2001 is made up of verbatim quotations and voices. Originally intended as a libretto, the play was first staged in Barcelona in October 2002, and, once more, depended on a classic -Vinaver's own translation of Euripides' The Trojan Women, mixed with phrases and exclamations heard as an immediate reaction to the aircraft crashes on that day. "There is an illuminating relationship between the fall of Troy and September 11," Vinaver told Time magazine. "These two huge events of mythic size seem to form a span of history."
In Germany, theatre has reacted to the events of September 11 by "getting more serious, has stopped being so ironical, and is no longer shy of making moral statements", according to Martin Berg, head of drama at Munich's Goethe Institute. Examples of new plays about politics include Falk Richter's Seven Seconds and Hotel Palestine, Roland Schimmelpfennig's For a Better World and the Viennese Elfriede Jelinek's Bambiland. "The main theme," says Berg, "is philosophical: how can we believe anyone and how can we fix reality?"
In Spain, which experienced its own terrorist attack on March 11 this year, there has been a more passionate response. Maria Delgado, professor of drama at Queen Mary College, University of London, says that, "In Spain, the theatrical profession came out against the war much more than in Britain. You would see a performance in, say, Barcelona, and at the curtain call actors would come on with anti-war armbands and sometimes actually make a declaration saying that they were against the war."
Theatre people in Spain still remember the censorship of the Franco years and value the things that they had to fight very hard for. "Theatre really matters in Spain," she says. But there have been no new plays about the "war on terror". Here, once again, the classics have been pressed into national service. Director Ramon Simo staged Albert Camus' Caligula for the Forum Arts Festival in 2004, a play about absolute power and terror that had been written under the Nazis but which gained a new resonance after March 11. Likewise, Roger Bernat's The Amnesia of Flight, a play about the fear of immigration, was firmly in the Spanish tradition of preferring allegory to direct political statements. Ditto for Calixto Bieito's and Alex Rigola's work with Shakespeare.
By contrast, Italian theatre has been disappointing. With the exception of old campaigners such as Dario Fo and Franca Rame, whose The Two-Headed Anomaly satirised prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Italians prefer to stage translations of plays about violence and war by British writers such as David Edgar and Edward Bond. Otherwise, it's back to the classics -such as director Luca Ronconi's outstanding version of Euripides' Bacchantes - or banal one-person monologues about how bad life is.
In Britain, it is now clear that the days are gone when the best way of emptying your theatre was to mount a political play. However, the increasing use of verbatim theatre techniques in the context of a liberal consensus still raises questions about how we dramatise truth. The main hope for the future of political theatre is surely not preaching to the converted, but rather asking urgent questions that stretch our minds.
In 1985, David Hare staged Pravda, a play about a media tycoon with a strong resemblance to Rupert Murdoch. But because its central character came across as a passionate believer in the capitalist creed, the play challenged those on the left to ask themselves whether their lack of success in the Thatcher years was their own fault - the result of a failure of self-belief. If Hare can repeat this theatrical coup with Stuff Happens, he will be giving political theatre a much-needed shot in the arm.
