The George and Tony Show

By Richard Schickel

However slippery and accommodating his nature, Prime Minister Tony Blair (Julian Sands) is still a proper Brit. He wants to traverse the road to the invasion of Iraq in rational steps--lots of jaw-jaw at the United Nations before war-war begins. President George W. Bush, played with implacable self-righteousness by Keith Carradine, is of a different mind. As imagined by David Hare in Stuff Happens, the only voice Bush hears or heeds belongs to God, who is in a bellicose mood. Both recent history and the laws of dramaturgy tell us, even before the beginning of the play--in its U.S. premiere at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum--how this debate between unequals will come out; in life or onstage, single-minded passion will always trump tense dispassion.

Director Gordon Davidson gives the play a bristling, relentless staging, with full awareness of the comic possibilities in Dick Cheney's glum realism and Donald Rumsfeld's chipper heedlessness--and of the shadowy hints of tragedy in Colin Powell's ambiguous role. Stuff Happens may be overlong, but it is often very good theater--especially when it is, as it were, on the record, re-creating the known absurdities (and apparent lies) of Establishment figures enabling a mysteriously driven leader. Power, in this play, does not exactly corrupt, but it does render people giddy with their essentially unchallenged ability to manipulate not merely poor Blair but reality itself.

Still, there is something discomfiting about Stuff Happens. In a docudrama, it is always the second half of the neologism that makes us queasy. Hare is a supremely self-confident playwright. His dramatic inventions--of private conversations, of motivational hints--are always plausible. And applaudable, if you are, like this reviewer, skeptical of the Iraq war effort. But they are, of course, historically unreliable. For Hare is a British twit of the tiresomely superior leftist kind. We have no doubt that if he, instead of Blair, had been Prime Minister, he would have stood up more manfully to the Bushies. We have no doubt of his pip-pip contempt for the primitive politics of his slightly dim-witted American cousins. This attitude is fun. And it makes us squirm. But attitude is not insight. We leave Stuff Happens thinking that the chief defect of American politics is its lack of sly and worldly Oxbridge graduates of the kind serving Blair. At one point in the play, a Yank says to a British official that 9/11 forever changed America. Yes, he replies, it made it more stupid. Maybe so. But something more than stupidity made the Iraq tragedy. About what that might be, David Hare, trafficker in caricature, hasn't a clue. --By Richard Schickel