Putting political ogres onstage is a tricky business, especially when they’re still in office; but two very different plays show how it can be done in vivid journeys of theatrical imagination, based on known facts. In Stuff Happens, which opened last night in a new production at New York’s Public Theatre after premiering at the National last year as part of the Travelex £10 season, David Hare offers what New York Times critic Ben Brantley today calls “a fluid public speculation — a collective work of imagination that attempts to grasp how and why an unnecessary and unwinnable war was allowed to happen.”
It sounds, too, like there has been an interesting shift of emphasis from London that has moved the play away from Bush and Blair and towards focusing on Colin Powell. This is partly a question of performance. According to Brantley, “Bush, who as embodied by Alex Jennings was unquestionably the psychological linchpin of the National production, is less complex here. Mr. Jennings’s Bush initially registered as a boyish pretender playing cowboy-president. But as the drama progressed, you sensed an unwavering conviction that seemed to spring from a belief in a president’s divine right to rule. The audience’s growing realization that this character was not the joke he first appeared to be might be said to parallel changing perceptions about the real Mr. Bush. quare of jaw and mountainous of build, Mr. Sanders’s Bush is, from the beginning, a monolithic presence, less an evolving character than a fixed historical force.”
He then adds, “The same could be said of Byron Jennings’s Tony Blair, a part Mr. Hare has tweaked to put more emphasis on the prime minister’s idealism and less on his political survival strategies. (In London, Nicholas Farrell seemed to glisten with the oil of self-preservation.)”
As a result, Brantley suggests, “This automatically shifts the play’s centre. If Stuff Happens were indeed the Shakespearean history play it aspires to be, its London production might have been called George II; the New York version is unmistakably The Tragedy of Colin Powell.” Thanks to Peter Francis James’ performance, Brantley says, “Powell becomes the character everyone is most likely to identify with. Here is a smart careerist who winds up believing that his boss’s agenda is neither ethical nor desirable. Most of us, at least those of us who like to imagine we still have some integrity, have found ourselves in comparable situations in the workplace. Now imagine that situation with the stakes raised to world-changing, life-annihilating heights.”
The same personally compromised position is the one that a white psychiatrist finds himself in Fraser Grace’s Breakfast with Mugabe, currently being presented as part of the RSC’s New Writing season at Soho Theatre, as he is called on to attend to the mental health of the Zimbabwean President. Based on a newspaper report in 2001 that Mugabe did actually consult with one, Grace makes a brilliant speculative journey into what might have happened. Like Hare, he is not privy to the conversations that actually took place, so they’re imagined; but as Grace says in a programme note, it’s one in which “everything that happens offstage is piteously, relentlessly, unproductively true”.
The same is the case with Stuff Happens. Both plays are thrilling history plays, helping us to make sense of the seemingly senseless decisions taken behind closed doors that we are not otherwise privy to.
But even more startling is the news from Zimbabwe itself, where a group of local actors are daring to stage a new play called Pregnant with Emotion, about a child who refuses to be born there until there is a change of leadership. Mugabe isn’t personally named, but director Daves Guzha says, “It’s very critical of the regime and for the first time comes up with a solution”, according to a report in last week’s Sunday Times. “I think you reach a stage where you say to yourself, ‘Either I must stand up or forever be quiet.’
It has already had an enthusiastic two-week run in Harare, attended by the state’s secret police. “We knew who they were,” says Guzha, “and directed all the anger towards them.” This is theatre that stands up to be counted, in every sense.
