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Far from demonising George W Bush, David Hare presents him as an all-too plausible character
As someone says in David Hare's play, Stuff Happens, war should be the
politics of last resort. In Iraq, the neocons jumped the gun. The rush
to battle may have been outpaced, though, by the speed of the stage transfer.
War is now the theatre of first resort and George W Bush is filling houses
everywhere.
In New York, a Bush-based oeuvre sprawls through Broadway. In London,
Tim Robbins's antiwar satire, Embedded, a queasy hybrid of Journey's
End and Spitting Image, has just gone into preview. So, at the National
Theatre, has Hare's state-of-the-nation epic, greeted, like every new
Hare play, with the awe that once presaged a royal birth.
© Guardian Newspapers Ltd.