A Footlight to History

London theater is getting to be like an anti-Republican convention. There’s Hollywood activist Tim Robbins’ Iraq protest-play, Embedded, at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, where Bush and his Cabinet are portrayed as masked, jabbering clowns, and every joke is greeted with gales of supportive laughter. And for a chewier take on the subject, there’s David Hare’s Stuff Happens at the National Theatre, where lobby vendors sell books by Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky along with olive-drab T shirts bearing the show’s title.

It’s what the politicians might call twin-track theater — plays seeking to work as both entertainment and propaganda. But where Embedded is a sloppy, two-dimensional piece of agitprop, Hare’s show is more diplomatic, and dramatizes the runup to war without turning the politicians into cartoons. Desmond Barrit gives an icy turn as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, and as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Nicholas Farrell catches the vocal tics and eager body language almost too precisely. Alex Jennings’ George W. Bush cannily suggests the confidence and drive beneath the cowboy persona. And the dramatic high point comes when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (Joe Morton) battles with Nick Sampson’s silkily threatening French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin over the all-important right to a second United Nations resolution.

If all that sounds more like a news story than a play, Hare the playwright has defeated Hare the propagandist. The veteran dramatist knows that great characters make great drama, and he delivers them.