Stuff Happens

a new play by David Hare

The public booking is already open so you can book online National's Theatre's website or phone the bookoffice on 02074523000 It starts 1st September and runs through to 6th November.

Production photographs are by Ivan Kyncl

Click here read interesting article by Nigel Reynolds

Click here for reviews . Please note out of respect for the Writer, Director, Actors and Production team we have not added any reviews etc of the preview period that appeared in the press. It is considered disrespectful for professional critics and press to make comments and a judge a production before opening night.

Note by David Hare:Programme logo

Stuff Happens is a history play, which happens to centre on very recent history. The events within it have been authenticated from multiple sources, both private and public. What happened happened Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue. Scenes of direct address quote people verbatim. When the doors close on the world’s leaders and on their entourages, then I have used my imagination. This is sure a play, not a documentary, and driven, I hope, by its themes as much as by its characters and story. I must thank all those people — some at the heart of these events, others to the side — who generously gave sc much of their time and their knowledge to help my understanding. I owe much to Dr Christopher Turner, visiting scholar at Columbia University, who assisted me throughout. No bland formulation of thanks can do justice to the depth and detail of his research.


Synopsis:

Stuff happens… and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.

The American Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld’s famous response to the looting of Baghdad, at a press conference on 11 April 2003, provides the title for a new play, specially written for the Olivier Theatre. Stuff Happens sets out to dramatise the extraordinary process which led up to the formation of a coalition, headed by the US and Great Britain, to invade Iraq.

How does the world settle its differences, now there is only one superpower? What happens to leaders risking their credibility with sceptical publics? From events which have dominated international headlines for the last two years David Hare has fashioned both a historical narrative and a human drama about the frustrations of power and the limits of diplomacy.

This is David Hare’s thirteenth play for the National. With the support of the NT Studio, it is being developed throughout the summer, during the months before its opening, and will accommodate events as they occur.

Production details:Production Picture


Cast:

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

by John Lahe, The New Yorker, The Critics, Issue of 2004-09-27 Posted 2004-09-20

David Hare on the march to war in Iraq.

"I don’t do nuance,” President Bush has reportedly said. Fortunately, David Hare does. Although he is sometimes sniffy about journalism - he titled his own volume of feuilletons “Writing Left-Handed” - Hare functions best as a dramatist when he assumes the role of reporter and allows his intellectual curiosity to override his literary immodesty. For more than a decade, his plays have brought us news from the inner sanctums of power: the Anglican Church (“Racing Demon,” 1990), the legal system (“Murmuring Judges,” 1991), the Labour Party (“The Absence of War,” 1993), and the management of the British railways (“The Permanent Way,” 2003). Now, in his best political play yet, “Stuff Happens” (at London’s Royal National Theatre), he brings us an exhilarating account of the genesis of the current war in Iraq.

On a spare, gray stage dominated by a large blond-wood table to which the actors spring from chairs lined up around the perimeter like so many soldiers on parade, Hare and his director, Nicholas Hytner, marshal with splendid rigor the facts, the personalities, and the issues at play in America’s rush to war. The lucid three-hour retelling is a sort of docu-fiction, in which the events, public statements, and segues are all authentic while the behind-closed-doors dialogue is either punched up from known sources or invented. In Hare’s version of history, our leaders, who, like the rest of the nation, lost the illusion of invulnerability on September 11, 2001, are compelled to construct for the American people an unambivalent triumphalist fable of revenge. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are enemies created by America - a point that Secretary of State Colin Powell (Joe Morton) drives home to the President (Alex Jennings) while trying to talk him down from war. “There’s an element of hypocrisy, George,” Powell says of his boss’s argument that Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction. “We were trading with the guy! Not long ago. People keep asking, how do we know he’s got weapons of mass destruction? How do we know? Because we’ve still got the receipts.” The American leaders, in their desperate search for a heroic narrative, call off the British, who have bin Laden cornered in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. “The British Army capturing him would not ring the same bells,” Tony Blair (the droll Nicholas Farrell) says, his voice nearly cracking with frustration

From a theatrical point of view, the real Bush is a bad actor. Although everything in his statements is designed to show strength, nothing in his presentation of self does. He cannot sustain the illusion of intellectual command. He is betrayed by his darting eyes, his misspeaking, his inability to improvise, his awkward pigeon-chested swagger. In Texas, that swagger “is called walking,” he said at the Republican National Convention, earlier this month; everywhere else, they call it walking on tiptoes. In his portrayal of Bush, Jennings has to work hard to mute his own natural alertness. He has Bush’s baby face but not his slow metabolism, which is what allows his characterization to avoid lampoon. Hare wants us to think about Bush, not dismiss him.

Michael Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9/11” shows footage of the first seven minutes after Bush got word of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, while sitting in a classroom at a Sarasota, Florida, elementary school; the President appears to sit in a state of almost comic blankness. Bush, however, claims to have been far from blank. “They had declared war on us,” he later told Bob Woodward, “and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war.” In “Stuff Happens,” that idée fixe plays strongly beneath the swirl of hand-wringing and executive argy-bargy. In fact, one of the things that Hare shows so well is that thought for Bush is a sort of pseudo event, a posture that carries no weight - thinking is a fuse that has to be blown in order for him to do what he wants to do. We see this best as Bush sits through Powell’s eloquent elucidation of the Pottery Barn rule - you break it, you own it - in reference to unilateral action in Iraq. Bush’s opaque form of listening is a kind of vamping. His terse responses follow the General’s argument, but he doesn’t appear to take it in. Morton’s Powell is perhaps a little overwrought for a general who keeps on his desk the motto “Never let them see you sweat”; nonetheless, he’s impressive. Of the entire cast of characters, Powell, who was not asked by the President to weigh in on the final decision to go to war, emerges with his dignity the most intact.

Hare has a sharp eye for ironic detail, and he knows a dramatic moment when history throws one at him. When, in order to shore up Blair’s precarious political position, the Bush Cabinet is forced to entertain the idea of working toward a second United Nations resolution, the prospect sends the U.N.-hating Vice-President Dick Cheney around the bend. Cheney is well played here by Desmond Barrit, who has a blocky build and a sour, stolid mien - one of the few actors who bear a physical resemblance to the person whose delirium they are portraying. In the scintillating debate that ensues, Cheney argues that Blair is becoming more trouble than he’s worth. “It’s a good rule,” he says. “When the cat shit gets bigger than the cat, get rid of the cat.”

Still, Hare refuses to turn “Stuff Happens” into a jamboree of self-righteousness. The audience gets its share of laughs -“I didn’t even find lunch,” the arms inspector David Kay says of his vain search for weapons of mass destruction - but the play smiles with cold teeth. To pass the time between sessions at a Camp David Cabinet meeting, Bush works on a jigsaw puzzle, and Laura Bush (Isla Blair) asks if anyone knows a hymn. The national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (Adjoa Andoh), begins to sing “Amazing Grace.” The moment, which one expects to be camp, turns out to be poignant. Rice’s voice has a vulnerability that the rhetoric of the government does not, and the rest of the Cabinet joins in.

By making ambivalence manifest, “Stuff Happens” shows an admirable maturity. Hare is looking for complexity, not self-congratulation, and an inquiry that is history, not agitprop - a strategy that becomes clear in a crucial early scene in which an angry journalist attacks the audience and the author for their “relentless archaic discussion of the manner of the liberation”:

How obscene it is, how decadent, to give your attention not to the now, not to the liberation, not to the people freed . . . the splendid thing done -freedom given to people who were not free—this thing is ignored, preferring as we do to fight among ourselves—our own disputes, our own resentment of each other elevated way above the needs of the victims. . . . A people hitherto suffering now suffer less. This is the story. No other story obtains.

Hare, whose play documents the folly of single solutions, is too canny to settle for one himself. What is the story behind Bush and the war? The oil thing? The Oedipal thing? The imperial thing? The reëlection thing? “Stuff Happens” keeps all of these possibilities in play. Terrorism attacks thought; September 11th made us all—even the Cabinet members—survivors. The political mess that ensued, the play shows, is proof positive that stress makes you stupid. The mind in a hurry sees what it expects or wants to see. The very title of the play—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the looting and mayhem in Iraq after the invasion—is offensive because it refuses to acknowledge reality, to name pain. “Stuff Happens” goes some way toward rectifying that omission, and that alone makes it a mighty act of antiterrorism.

At the finale, an Iraqi exile stands before us on an empty stage. “They came to save us, but they had no plans,” he says. “And now the American dead are counted, their numbers recorded, their coffins draped in flags. How many Iraqis have died? How many civilians? No figure is given. Our dead are uncounted.” He adds, “Iraq has been crucified. . . . Basically it’s a story of a nation that failed in only one thing. . . . It failed to take charge of itself.” As the curtain falls, Hare and Hytner leave us with this one last unspoken provocation: no Iraqi would have been free to make such a bold accusation if, seventy-two days after September 11th, Bush hadn’t put his arm around Rumsfeld in the White House Situation Room and said, “What kind of war plan do you have for Iraq?”

Theatre 'has duty to seek truth on Iraq for public'

Article by Nigel Reynolds, Telegraph 11/09/04

The National Theatre has a duty to question Tony Blair and George Bush on the real causes of the Iraq war, Nicholas Hytner, the theatre's new director, said last night.

Mr Hytner was speaking before the opening of Stuff Happens, Sir David Hare's controversial new play about the build-up to the war.

Politicians in America and Britain were so sparing with the truth that the theatre had to take up cudgels on behalf of a confused public, he said.

In their first interviews about the play, Sir David and Mr Hytner, insisted that Stuff Happens should be seen as "a work of art" not a piece of journalism, though it contained many truths.

Sir Peter Hall, a previous director of the National, was a frequent critic of Mrs Thatcher's policies. However, Stuff Happens is one of the most direct challenges Britain's flagship theatre has mounted on a prime minister.

Mr Blair, though engagingly played by Nicholas Farrell, is shown as a puppet of Mr Bush, who repeatedly misleads the Prime Minister during the war's build-up.

Mr Hytner last year turned a staging of Henry V into a critique of the West's handling of the invasion of Iraq.

In an interview last night with BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme, Mr Hytner defended the publicly-funded National's position. "I am proud of it," he said.

"The National Theatre should be sceptical of authority. It should be investigative of how our Government is doing. It should be relentlessly curious about the world that we serve.

"One of the reasons that so-called political theatre has undergone such a tremendous revival over the last couple of years is because our leaders say so little to us of substance. Political discourse has become so impoverished. It's so controlled. People like Alistair Campbell tell politicians what they can and cannot say. We feel starved of real debate.

"What we are after here is a collective investigation into something which we have every right to investigate.

"Our country was taken to war by our leaders. A lot of us disagreed with it. Even if we agreed with it, we cannot doubt that it is our right to ask ourselves what happened."

The play features the joint powers' central characters in the decision to go to war - including Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell (also shown as weak in his opposition) and Jack Straw.

Audiences are likely to debate long and hard about the accuracy of the play. Until last night Sir David and Mr Hytner had refused to be interviewed.

In the programme notes Sir David says that the public statements by the leaders that he had used were all well documented. But he had to invent the dialogue for private conversations between them.

Also being interviewed by Front Row, Sir David said: "The misfortune for me - and I make my own problems - is that it will inevitably at the moment be seen as journalism and not as art. But I intend it as art."

However, the playwright insisted that he had interviewed numerous public figures close to the centres of power and that all imaginary conversations were either "well sourced and checked and re-checked" or that they "matched patterns".

President Bush was a far more cunning figure than Mr Blair ever bargained for and as a result Mr Blair was repeatedly manipulated.

Mr Hytner, who has been running the National for 18 months, said he was not afraid of the same kind of Government backlash as the BBC suffered after the war.

"I don't think we have the same responsibilities as the BBC," he said. "As David said, this is art and not journalism. David is very explicit about where you can trust this to be verbatim, the truth, and where imagination has been brought to bear. I honestly believe that that is the end of the story."

Reviews:

Theatre of War

Review by Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 13th September 2004-09-13

Brilliant, discomforting and coruscating, David Hare’s Iraq war play, Stuff Happens, is the most powerful work of drama for years!

PQ in rehearsal Moments after most plays end, a theatre will fill with gossip. Show-goers ask one another: ‘Wasn’t that fun?’ Or; sometimes: ‘What on earth was that about?’

At the Royal National Theatre last night week after Stiff Happens, Sir David Hare’s new play about the Iraq war, there was little much to chatter. Spectators filed out of the huge Olivier auditorium in a state of quelled horror: Their mood was that of a congregation leaving a particularly sad funeral.

They seemed depressed. Almost guilty! These gullible Brits, many of whom will have voted for Tony Blair, seemed to realise they had been bent double, violated, and hoisted to war by a bristly U.S. President and his wild-kicking mustangs.

Three years ago, the September 11 attacks hit homeland USA. Three years it has taken British theatre to stir itself into reaction. This week at the state-pampered, Blair-feely National, it happened. Hare’s three-hour blizzard of exposition, facts and devastating detail was worth the wait. The thing is a thunderbolt.

We see a British Prime Minister dragged to war like a pedestrian whose jacket is caught in a bus door and who hammers on the panelling, unheard, as the vehicle pulls out onto the highway.

‘We all remember what happened to Neil Kinnock,’ say’s Hare’s Blair, recalling how the former leader was once cut out by the Reagan White House. Blair took the decision to support Bush almost as early as Bush and his neo-con cabal resolved to ‘do’ Iraq.

Men who are dead set on bad decisions are the stuff of theatrical tragedy. That is what makes Hare’s play powerful – the way events have spooled out of our control. Much of the dialogue is direct speech from actual events. The major politicians, similarly, are close impersonations. This is tragedy as re-enactment, not as straight fiction.

Nicholas Farrell is a convincing Blair, his narrow head and floaty hair near-perfect. He has the same wide-crotch stance, and his eloquent voice there are familiar undertows of self-justification and wheedling vanity.

George Bush is played with a Frank Spencerish twitch of the shoulder by Alex Jennings. Although an aggressor, surfing events to search of excitement, Bush is not quite the total goon caricatured frequently by other critics.

He does listen to the peace please of his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, but firmly opts for violence. Powell is horribly out-manoeuvred by his White House colleagues but Hare presents him as a hero.

Not all the President’s men are impressed with Blair. Vice-president Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld make it plain they think the British Premier a useful idiot – expendable, leftist.

He is ‘a preacher sitting on top of a tank’ – in short, a thorough plonker. Hare, himself a man of the Left, tried to feel Blair’s dilemma. Although he is pretty fair to him, the evidence-backed conclusion is devastating. Tony Blair is a weak sap, a sycophant, a sucker. The national should not expect many block bookings from Downing Street for this show.

The staging uses little more than a few chairs, a large table and telephones. For a play with so few props and so many detailed lines, it is high achievement to hold the audience’s attention so comprehensively.

Cheney (Desmond Barrit on form) and Rumsfeld (Dermot Crowley, who has Rummy’s gate perfectly) yap their alacrity for war. Another White House Right-winger; falling hungrily on his lunch, says: ‘ I could a baby through the bars of a cot.’

The play maybe pushed the personal attack on figures such as Cheney and Rumsfeld too far. This week, of all weeks, we should not forget that America was a victim of a foul attack. Washington does have a legitimate desire for justice.

But Hare’s play reminds you of Rumfeld’s real words and of Cheney’s undeniable, tangle of conflicts of interest with arms exporters and murky Halliburton Corporation.

This is the stunning thing, you see. Confronted by Hare’s facts, it is hard to argue that the awful wrong of September 11, 2001 has not been compounded by the bellicose excess of DC.

Even the title comes from a genuine Rumsfeld gaffe at the Pentagon Press Conference. Invited to condemn civil unrest in post-war Baghdad, he shrugged his shoulders and said, hey, ‘stuff happens’ Hare saw in those two words a distillation of what he regards as the Bush administration’s carelessness and callousness.

On the night I went, we had some hissing at the entrance of Bush’s security advisor Condoeezza Rice (Adjoa Andoh, brilliant in the role, makes the slim-waisted ‘Condi’ cunning and deadly). Several people reacted with derision at Blair’s absurder bouts of rhetoric.

There was also a heckler who hoorayed one of Rumsfeld’s speeches and shouted, ‘Hurry up!’ as an Iraq character was speaking the epilogue. It is rare and exhilarating to hear such yelps of reaction in a British theatre audience.

The actor responded magnificently to the heckler, focusing his speech angrily at the culprit.

We see the matey familiarity of diplomats on the United Nations circuit, and in one memorable scene Jack Straw (Iain Mitchell) gets his voice much better than Rory Bremner has ever managed) appears far more interested in knowing what’s for lunch that what is on the diplomatic menu.

Hare depicts Alastair Campbell as snorting that Saddam Hussein, has the IQ of parsley’ and Blair mocks the UN weapons inspector Hans Bix for ‘running round Mesopotamia like Hercule Poirot.’

At three hours, Stuff Happens does not make for a short or easy evening. It has dramatic shortcomings and you not go unless you are keenly interested in politics.

Hare is mainlining into the so-called opinion-forming elite here. That could make this play not only a major cultural event but also, in a likely election year, a political one.

But perhaps, amid the criticism, we should be thankful that such epic political drama is permitted at our state theatre. It never was that way in old Baghdad.

As Hare has one character say: ‘How spoiled, how indulged we are, to discuss the matter. How western we are.’ Stuff may happen but at least the National Theatre is allowed to hold it to account.

Fine Journalism Underpins Wonderful Drama

Review by Charles Spence, Daily Telepgraph, 13 September 2004

So many members of the Special Pundit Service (SPS) have infiltrated previews to David Hare's new play that the theatre critic reporting for duty on press night feels like some hapless war correspondent arriving to cover a battle only to find that it is already over.

Strangely, however, the experts seemed unable to agree whether Hare has scored a famous victory, or suffered a disastrous defeat in his documentary drama about the build-up to the war in Iraq. Some found it a crashing bore, others cheered it to the rafters, and quite a few were somewhere in between.

Well, Stuff Happens gets my vote. This is a masterly piece of work - illuminating, gripping, wildly funny and ultimately desperately sad, and proof that when it comes to urgent public debate there is no forum to match the theatre at its best.

That last point is reassuring since other recent theatrical responses to the war in Iraq - Alistair Beeton's witless musical, Follow My Leader, and Tim Robbins's dire adolescent satire, Embedded, revealed the theatre at its worst, both complacent and unforgivably self-congratulatory.

It has long struck me that David Hare is a good playwright and a great journalist and so it proves again here. He marshals his material with extraordinary clarity, develops complex arguments so that even a political lame-brain like me can follow them, and out of a diffuse mass of material creates a work that is shapely, elegant and dramatically welcoming.

There are more than 40 characters in this play, yet the depiction of the Bush government's steely determination to go to war in the aftermath of September 11, and Tony Blair's increasingly desperate attempts to accommodate them without alienating his own party, becomes the stuff of real drama.

Those of a hawkish disposition might complain that the neo-con Americans are presented as little more than caricatures, but then the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld don't need actors impersonating them to seem like nightmares imagined by Gerald Scarfe.

By and large - and I write as someone who initially supported the war only to be desperately disillusioned by all the evidence of bad faith - the play strikes me as fair and even-handed.

Hare combines verbatim theatre - using the actual speeches of those involved - with imagined scenes of private conversations behind closed doors. He insists that nothing in his narrative is knowingly untrue, and I believe him. This is a drama with the smack of both authority and dramatic insight about it.

Nicholas Hytner directs a thrillingly fluent, superbly acted production on an almost bare Olivier stage. We move from the White House to 10 Downing Street, from Camp David to Iraq with a minimum of fuss, and almost every scene has both point and dramatic punch.

Alex Jennings gives a wonderful performance as Bush, capturing his folksy charm as well as that alarming combination of dimness and dangerous certainty, while Nicholas Farrell offers a comic tour de force as Blair, hilariously mixing smug sanctimony and sweaty panic.

Stuff Happens is, without doubt, the must-see drama of the year.

The Trouncing of Mr Blair

Review by by Nicholas de Jongh, London Evening Standard, 13 September 2004

Theatrical history is made with David Hare's riveting political documentary, a lucid scrutiny of flimsy motives and dodgy politicians, for which Nicholas Hytner organises a beautifully staged and acted production.

From 1737 and until 1968 censorship of the stage outlawed political plays. It has taken until 2004 for any major theatre to present a serious play that grapples with contemporary political issues and puts genuine or imagined speeches into politicians mouths.

Hare's script is a fascinating compound of politicians actual words, together with psychologically astute character-portraiture. It seeks to convey how our Prime Minister and their President maintained the Anglo-American alliance and invaded Iraq.

The play's defect is the occasional shrouding of the anti-war perspective with shrill, extraneous, pro-war apologists. Hare also ignores aspects of Bush's conduct outlined in the 9/11 commission of inquiry: why, for example, no consideration of Bush's Saudi Arabian connections and the despatching of 140 Saudis home within days of the catastrophe?

The fascination of Stuff Happens has to do with the playwright's audacious decision to imagine himself into the minds of the two leaders, attributing views and behaviour to them for which at best he can have had only vague guidance.

There is a furtive excitement, like voyeurism or eavesdropping, about these well imagined scenes-behind-the-scenes, where Bush and Blair meet or speak. Hare gives a brutal ring of conviction to these conflicted encounters.

He depicts Blair, in Nicholas Farrell's lethal, revelatory, blackly comic performance, as a squirming hunk of tentative obsequiousness, a pathetic, boneless wonder in dire straits, who comes up against the stone wall of affable inscrutability and condescension with which Hare endows Bush.

Blair's attempts to question American policy, to secure a second UN resolution, to have the Arab-Israeli roadmap to peace unrolled, are all frustrated by Bush's wily deviousness.

The effect of Hare's characterisations and Farrell's performance is to make us contemplate the disturbing idea that no British prime minister since Anthony Eden has been so trounced and bounced by a foreign leader.

This redefining of George Bush, superlatively impersonated by Alex Jennings with a jovial swagger, divine self-assurance and passive belligerence, aptly subverts complacent notions of his dumbness.

Jennings's charismatic President hands over the reins so Dermot Crowley's smug, faintly camp Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, his sinister deputy Wolfowitz and Desmond Barrit's menacing Cheney seem to be riding the war-horse hard. But Bush always charts the destination.

Joe Morton's despairing Secretary Powell, who emerges dramatically as the single opponent of war, is easily outmanoeuvred, sacrificing his convictions for his job. Frayn's Democracy was more imaginatively adventurous but Stuff Happens lights the way for a new political theatre.

We would like to thank Paul for providing us this review.

Stuff Happens

Review by Mark Shenton, Whatsonstage.com, 13 September 2004 (4 Star rating)

The National Theatre re-asserts its place not just at the heart of our theatrical life but also at the heart of our national (and international) political life, making headlines of its own with a play plucked from events that have dominated the international headlines for the past two years.

Premiered on the eve of the third anniversary of September 11th, which set this train of events in motion, David Hare’s Stuff Happens takes its title from American Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the looting of Baghdad after it had been invaded: “Stuff happens…. And it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

Does that include our politicians? The beliefs that Iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction, that have in fact never been found, and that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, that has never been proved, led to a war that untidily killed untold (and never counted) civilians and even more untidily has made the world more, not less, susceptible to the kind of terrorism it sought to stamp out.

Downstairs in the NT Lyttelton, artistic director Nicholas Hytner has directed Alan Bennett’s wonderfully wry and intoxicating play The History Boys about the subjectivity of historical interpretation. Meanwhile, upstairs in the NT Olivier – as part of the Travelex £10 season that importantly makes it available to everyone – Hytner now directs this sober, reflective but nevertheless galvanising history play that, as Hare asserts in a programme note, “happens to be centre on very recent history.”

While Stuff Happens seeks to steer an apparently objective documentary path through the facts that made up the US and UK’s drive towards conflict, Hare’s own arrangement of those facts into a compelling narrative – and our own memories of how we felt at the time, since no one can possibly come neutral to this play – leads us to our own conclusions

A play about global politics and process that stretches from the White House and Camp David to Downing Street and the United Nations, Hare’s play and Hytner’s production of it is a tremendous technical achievement as it adroitly marshals some 45 characters and 24 scenes, crowded onto a spartan circular stage that designer Christopher Oram has superbly dressed to suggest different locations via a frame at the rear of the stage.

But it’s also a considerable dramatic achievement, too, proving the theatre’s unrivalled ability to quickly respond, analyse, debate and provoke. The play bristles with ideas and philosophies, and comes alive with an impassioned, informed and, above all, entertaining immediacy. A superb ensemble cast animate it with an extraordinary vividness, with stand-outs including Alex Jennings as George Bush, Joe Morton as a completely compelling Secretary of State Colin Powell trying but failing to urge caution, Desmond Barrrit as Dick Cheney, Dermot Crowley as Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, Ian Gelder as Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Nicholas Farrell as our own PM, frequently stricken like a rabbit in the headlights as he struggles to keep pace with the Americans.

This may not necessarily be the best new play the National has ever done, but it’s one of the most important. See it.

We would like to thank Paul for providing us this review.

Good stuff, as it happens

Review by Benedict Nightingale, Times, 11th September 2004 (4 Star Rating)

IF YOU believe that farsighted statesmen started a just and prudent war in Iraq, deterring the world’s terrorists as a happy by-product, David Hare’s new play may anger you.

PQ in RehearsalThe dramatist has had the gall to raise serious doubts about the wisdom and honesty of both the Coalition’s leaders. If, however, you take a different view of recent events, you may appreciate a play that strikes me as hard-hitting, yet balanced enough to acknowledge, say, Tony Blair’s desperate attempts to legitimise a dubiously legitimate war. Why, Hare even lets an actor give a long, angry speech about the racism of tolerating Saddam Hussein ’s treatment of his fellow Arabs.

So much lofty comment preceded last night’s opening of Stuff Happens — Robin Cook proclaiming himself powerfully moved by Hare’s account of a “misadventure”, Ann Widdecombe comparing his play to Nazi-style propaganda — that maybe I should limit myself to discussing the staging. But that would be difficult, because this is even simpler than it was for Hare’s recent railway documentary, The Permanent Way.

Indeed, it mostly consists of figures in suits emerging from the back to discuss policy round tables or simply to address the audience: prime among them, Alex Jennings’s out-of-depth Bush, Nicholas Farrell’s flummoxed, hapless, bleating Blair and Dermot Crowley’s frighteningly confident Rumsfeld, who emerges as the thinking man’s Ghengis Khan or maybe the unthinking man’s Kissinger.

The title comes from Rummy’s offhand remark about the looting of Baghdad. But Hare’s prime point is that neither he nor the other neoConservatives foresaw, tried to foresee or even wanted to foresee the “stuff” that happened after the war was superficially won. Smug remarks about oppressed people welcoming liberators with flowers were the best they could do. Their real agenda was to demonstrate America’s post-9/ll power by taking out a supposedly easy target, and, despite Colin Powell’s qualms, they took a gullible president with them.

Joe Morton’s Powell is Hare’s hero, avid as he is to avoid a war he feels is morally unjustified and politically foolish, but the perhaps unintended effect of his articulate passion is to leave us wondering why he didn’t have the consistency to resign. Wondering, too, about the accuracy and therefore the authority of a play whose author admits he’s “used my imagination” to fill in the bits not on public record. And yet again and again I felt that yes, this is how it was.

The inexorable slide to war is carefully chronicled: transatlantic calls to an increasingly compromised and irrelevant Blair (“that preacher on top of a tank”, as Des Barrit’s tough, crude Cheney calls him), arguments with the French, and all. And the piece ends, pointedly enough, with a rare voice from Baghdad. We know how many Americans have died, but how many Iraqis, how many civilians? That’s a question our leaders have yet to answer.

Stuff Happens

Review by Michael Billington, The Guardian, September 11, 2004

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.

Political theatre comes in all shapes and sizes: satirical, fictional, documentary and agitational. But Hare claims, with some justice, to be writing a history: one that traces a dramatic sequence of events through characters and issues. We know, on the whole, when characters are speaking verbatim. We also deduce, as in a Bush-Blair encounter on a Texas ranch, when Hare is extrapolating from the known facts. We also can work out when Hare is deploying dramatic licence.

This last point is crucial because Hare 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."

In Hare's terms, and in Joe Morton's performance, Powell emerges as a tragic figure: the one key player in the administration who sees the folly of invasion but who, in a climactic encounter with Bush, bites the bullet and goes along with the Cheney-Rumsfeld line. Hare never explains what leads to Powell's capitulation, but he leaves you in no doubt that it was a form of self-betrayal.

The great surprise of the show, however, is the way performance leads to reassessment of character. Bush, in many British eyes, is seen as some kind of holy fool or worse. But, through Hare's writing and Alex Jennings's performance, he emerges as a wily and skilful manipulator who plays the role of a bumbling pseudo-Texan but constantly achieves his desired ends.

Jennings, with his wire-drawn upper lip and tentative gestures, has caught the Bush mannerisms exactly: more significantly, he suggests Bush is the most adroit politician on stage.

By contrast, Tony Blair is seen satirically: the hints of a moral crusader are there, but in Nicholas Farrell's performance, he emerges largely as a demented egoist obsessed by his own political standing. There may be some truth in this, but the play would be stronger if Hare admitted that Blair may have been propelled by idealistic motives.

However, the pleasure lies in seeing recent history, in which we all have a stake, enacted on Britain's most prominent public stage. Nicholas Hytner's production is also elegant and unfussy, with the cast seated on stage throughout and emerging, as required, to enact their part in the drama. And, in a vast cast, there are standout performances from Desmond Barrit as an ideologically-driven Cheney, Dermot Crowley as an assertive Rumsfeld, and Adjoa Andoh as an ice-cold Condoleezza Rice.

No play about Iraq can tell the whole story; and I was surprised by Hare's omission of the crucial role played by the military, especially General Tommy Franks, who gave the war its own unstoppable momentum. But Hare's play offers a probing guide to the Iraq war and shows how the whole mess was based on a disastrous, unproven link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. One comes out enriched and better informed.

An Unsentimental Play About Stuff Happening

Teview by Charles Moore, Telegraph, 11/08/04

It goes without saying that David Hare is against the war in Iraq. He's a Left-wing playwright, after all, and it is effectively illegal for such people to support President George W Bush. But what makes his play interesting is that his opposition does, exactly, go without saying.

Except for the slightly sententious and uninteresting final speech by an Iraqi, Stuff Happens is a play, not a polemic. It doesn't insist on a single narrative, although one suspects that Bob Woodward is the main published source. It is a history play - a drama about the motives, conflicts and characters of leaders who have to make decisions with historic consequences.

Being a proper artist, Hare respects the reality, the burden, of making such decisions. This means that each person's position is comprehensible: Colin Powell has to risk accusations of weakness by warning the President what foreigners feel. Tony Blair has to get through domestic political opposition (the biggest laugh of the night comes when he pleads with the president at his ranch in Crawford that he's in trouble back home over foxhunting and "something called Railtrack"). Dick Cheney rages at being held up by Blair's moralistic internationalism - "the preacher sitting on top of a tank". Donald Rumsfeld, in a brilliant speech, rips off the veil that half-conceals European hatred of America.

Blake once said that Milton, in Paradise Lost, was "of the Devil's party, though he didn't know it". He meant that the poet had fallen in love with Satan, his most vivid creation. I wondered at first if the same mightn't be said about Hare in relation to George Bush. For though Bush-haters will find happy moments when the president seems ignorant or stupid (for example, his comments on Palestine based on one helicopter overflight with Ariel Sharon), he gradually emerges as the most interesting character.

Most of the audience probably want to laugh derisively when Bush is shown leading his team in prayer, but they can't, quite. He holds the stage, often by saying very little. Again and again, people - Powell, Blair, Condoleeza Rice - ask him for things. Powell whines about rivals. They all talk too much. Bush listens, and then decides, or then does what he was going to do anyway.

The most powerful scene is when the biggest players - Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell - debate what to do about Blair, Europe and the United Nations as the crunch approaches. Powell eloquently explains Blair's position and why the administration must support him. He says he likes Blair and Cheney says he hates him. The audience realises that these are vulnerable positions because they are too personal. George Bush, sitting quietly smiling there with Rice, lets the ideologies, feelings and characters clash. Then he explains in a couple of sentences why, on balance, Blair needs all the support America can give him. He decides.

And that, one realises, is the point. It is not that David Hare likes one character more than another. It is rather that, in a drama about power, the most powerful is the most interesting. Bush thinks that God has put him where he is for a reason. He finds that he can, as one of the narrators says, "achieve purpose". Instead of just explaining, which, he complains, he dislikes, he can command. He can actually make something happen.

You are left wondering. Is this a man who decides so clearly only because he has no conception of the vastness of his decision? That is what Colin Powell's vain protests imply. Or is he someone with the right temperament for authority - someone without self-indulgence or a taste for over-intellectualising? Hare allows you to entertain that thought.

Stuff Happens reminded me of Nicholas Hytner's excellent production of Henry V last year, which is not surprising since both appeared in the same theatre, under the shadow of the same war. When you watch Shakespeare, you don't find yourself asking: "Was Henry right to attack France?" That is a historical question, not a dramatic one. When you watch Hare, you don't ask: "Was Bush right to attack Iraq?" You learn more about what it is like to make such a decision.

I like the way Hare scarcely touches on the inner life of his characters - their marriages, their families, their private dreams and wounds. This is an austere play, about the austere choices of politics. It looks unsentimentally at what happens when stuff happens.

In The Presence of War

Review by Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 12th September 2004

Let's hear it for the resurgence of political theatre and all the amassing plays that won't let Bush and Blair conveniently forget about their questionable war in Iraq. It is an exciting phenomenon, drawing keen crowds with shows ranging from satires (like The Madness of George Dubya), to scrupulous verbatim docu-dramas (the Tricycle's recreation of the Hutton Inquiry), to pointedly updated classics (such as Nick Hytner's Henry V with CNN-style propaganda). Last week saw two big-name additions to the continuing debate.

The first is David Hare's Stuff Happens. The title is lifted from Donald Rumsfeld's notorious response to the looting in Baghdad, and Hare's self-styled "history play" focuses on the power wielded by Bush's inner circle charting their early suspicions about WMD and their increasingly belligerent post 9/11 policies, their internal arguments and their handling of Blair and the UN in the build-up to the 2003 invasion.

Hytner's fluid production is deliberately plain and simple or designed to look that way. The set (by Christopher Oram) is a wide circle, carpeted in bureaucratic grey and furnished with one long conference table. To avoid this becoming monotonous, a frame above the stage is sometimes illuminated, revealing a glowing, miniature view of the Whitehouse at night or of Bush's Texas ranch at sunset unsettlingly pretty compared to the business in hand. The cast, mostly dressed in dark suits, sit around the periphery when not participating in the action and serve as chorus, stepping forward to narrate or to throw in a few sharp comments about the key protagonists Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld et al.

Hare's programme note explains that all his scenes of direct address quote people word for word, and his quick-fire rounds of sound bites provoke some enlivening outbursts of cynical laughter not least Bush's declarations that his actions are inspired by God. This verbal grapeshot alternates with longer scenes portraying tense discussions behind closed doors.

Perhaps most startlingly, in the early scenes you start wondering if Hare, the famous Hampstead left-winger, has decided it's time for a swing to the right and that Bush is really his hero in the war on terror. Alex Jennings, who is obviously younger that the real-life George W, has a less ponderous presence and, surely, a higher IQ. This is actually a deliberate shift from the popular cliché that the President is a complete blundering idiot - in the end, Hare and Hytner are creating a more disturbing and complex figure. Jennings captures just enough of the oddly robotic swagger and drawl to both convince and amuse, while exuding surprising vulnerability and gentle manner - frequently reaching out to touch the arm of an adviser.

After that, he and his neo-con gang's hasty decision to bomb Afghanistan, apparently just an example to other states, is all the more shocking. Also, it's not a new observation but Bush's repeated comments about his supreme power clearly suggest the US has a dictator in its own midst.

Most fascinating is the ambiguity of his close relationship with his security adviser, Adjoa Andoh's ice-cool Condoleezza Rice. She sits at his side in meetings almost like a psychological crutch and speaks for him, but you never quite know if she's really running the country or is simply a handy mouthpiece for his policies.

This production is well worth seeing, not staggering perhaps but always absorbing, with intriguing subplots including secret double dealing by the French over the second UN resolution. However, I do have cavils. Some characters are less three-dimensional than others. Nicholas Farrell's flailing, snappy Blair too often seems like a comic caricature next to Jennings subtler performance although he does have shady moments regarding that intelligence dossier and he is undeniably amusing as he fumes about Hans Blix "running round Mesopotamia like Hercule Poirot".

Colin Powell is superbly played by Joe Morton his impassioned speeches are riveting, but his rectitude is probably a tad idealised to up the dramatic contrast with his horribly aggressive colleagues. And ultimately, one also has to be wary of political theatre. Hare's authorial note fudges the line between the ideal objectivity of news journalism and stuff he's made up, saying that all the events portrayed have been authenticated by multiple sources and that he's used his imagination. "Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue," he says. A slippery phrase surely worthy of a Whitehall spin-doctor.

Stuff Happens

Review by Charlotte Birkett, Theatreworld Internet Magazine September 2004

There's a much discussed revival of political theatre and documentary going on at the moment - Guantanamo, David Hare's The Permanent Way, Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me. And now comes Hare's Stuff Happens at Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre and directed by him. "Stuff happens" is how US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off the sight of Iraqi looters trashing Baghdad after the US invasion.

Hare describes it as "a history play, which happens to centre on a very recent history", and it's a history play in the same way that Shakespeare wrote history plays, charting in epic form the affairs of nations and of men - men in suits in this case, with hardly a woman in sight. And as so often with Shakespeare, Hare's theme is war, the progress both tortuous and headlong towards war with Iraq.

On the Olivier's huge stage, Hare assembles the leaders of the West like encampments of Greeks and Trojans: Bush's war council glancing cursorily at satellite photos of Iraq and deciding the blurred images look enough like weapons installations to go to war on, Blair's minions gathered round the news at Number Ten interpreting the coded messages coming from the French envoy to the UN. Meticulously the progress to war is charted in scenes that shift from the public pronouncements at press conferences, re-enacted verbatim, to imagined scenes of political huddle between the key players - Bush, Blair, Blix, Powell, de Villepin.

You could grumble it's all very static - men sitting around arguing. But strangely the three hours don't drag for a moment. It's a gripping account of how political stuff happens: the deliberations of grey suits determine the lives, deaths, freedom or enslavement of millions. We don't see these millions of course. Hare wisely keeps to the machinations of the mighty: the Bush camp is particularly vividly portrayed, with George W. himself wilier than commonly imagined in this country, presiding over an inner cabinet of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney, alternately rednecks and neocon policy wonks on the one hand, and Colin Powell, who comes closest to being the play's tragic hero, trying desperately to keep everybody on side and avert a war he knows to be immoral and futile, on the other. It's a measure of Hare's maturity that these characters, ripe for caricature for a sophisticated Old World audience are, if not sympathetically, then richly imagined.

Less colourful are the Brits, though Blair's contorted manoeuvrings to keep in with the U.S., and with his own backbenchers, are brilliantly dramatised.

It's a horribly familiar story of course, but Hare draws all the threads together with economy and precision. Certainly we know the end - but we know the end of Lear too, and that's part of the fascination as we watch the onset of the by no means inevitable. A strong cast is led by Alex Jennings as Bush, Nicholas Farrell as Blair and Joe Morton as Colin Powell.


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