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STUFF HAPPENS. By David Hare. Directed by Nick Hytner. Royal National Theatre (Olivier). London. 1 September 2004.
David Hare has decisively returned to political theatre. Of course, he probably does not believe he ever left, but Hare's plays of the last decade do not seem to have the scope and bite of Plenty (1978) or his trilogy of plays on national institutions at the beginning of the 1990s: Racing Demon, Murmuring judges, and The Absence of War. Ski/light, Amy's Room, My Zinc Bed, and The Breath of Life all seemed to turn on domestic issues, even if they were solidly liberal ones. Only Via Dolorosa (1998), selfperformed after an in-depth visit to the Middle East, reminded audiences of Hare's strongest creative identity as a deeply aware, trenchant observer of the effects of politics on human lives. In this past year, however, he has returned to matters of public concern with both The Permanent Way and Stuff Happens. The former took up the railway disasters of the late 1990s, and utilized the old Joint Stock model of interviews followed by a writing period. Indeed, it was directed by Max StaffordClark for his company Out of Joint in co-production with the National Theatre. Stuff Happens directly confronts the decisions of the British and American governments to go to war in Iraq. Its opening was a major London event this September, covered by various politicos and celebrities in advance reviews based on preview performances (angering those who thought this attempt to get the jump on the reviewers was a breach of preview protocol that harmed the artists by exposing them too early to public debate about tne merits of the production).
On opening night, I sat in the packed Olivier Theatre, surrounded by buzzing spectators, experiencing a true sense of hype. On stage, the opening moments show a cluster of (mostly) men in suits milling about as if in an antechamber on Capitol Hill. The lights change, they all turn and walk downstage, and the play begins. During the next two hours, Hare provides a version of how we got into the war. It is his version, because although he uses many verbatim speeches and other public-record utterances, he also imagines scenes behind closed doors at the highest...