by David Hare
Directed by Joel Greenberg
A Studio 180 Production
at the Berkeley Street Theatre
March 4-29, 2008

    Though Joel Greenberg’s production has a clean, uncluttered set (by Michael Gianfrancesco) and is competently acted and slickly choreographed in the manner of rhetorical chairs (a desk chair on casters for each character) that shift configurations through the course of David Hare’s talkative two-hour plus dialectical drama, there’s no escaping the fact that Stuff Happens is really an animated populist history of George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s rush to a disastrous war in Iraq. The animation comes by way of talking heads spouting much that we already know from articles and books and filmed documentaries, and though the play attempts to find focus and depth in its material, it doesn’t really have profound investigative or dramatic power. Hare deploys behind-the-scenes cabinet meetings, UN debates about weapons inspections and sanctions, and speculative discussions between Bush and Blair, but though there are witty ironies and some chilling facts, the play remains more talkative than some of Shaw’s most didactic pieces but with far less wit and variety. 

   The title comes from one of Donald Rumsfeld’s loonier pronouncements on the widespread violence and looting in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein: “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.” As an Arab character puts it in the play, this is one of the most racist remarks ever made. Yet, America seemed to be blithely unaware of its implications. The Iraq war is, of course, a crime against humanity, with the vast Iraqi dead still uncounted. It was the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but after 9/11, America changed by becoming much stupider—as a character shrewdly observes in the play. And this stupidity continues right into the present, in both the perversity of John McCain (who sounds no less insane than Bush at times) and the dreamy delusions of Barack Obama about being able to bring about real change in a land where half the country seems to be Republican, which, bluntly put, is another way of saying that it is toxic. But that is an argument for another venue.

   The chief figures (with few exceptions) in Hare’s play remain two-dimensional, which is particularly unfortunate when actors are playing real-life people. Hardee T. Lineham’s Dick Cheney lacks the low-throated growl and Macchiavellian evil of the most infamous Vice-President in U.S. history, though David Fox gets a little satiric mileage out of his impression of nuttily dangerous Rumsfeld, an oily, smirking Secretary of Defence. Yanna McIntosh gives a slick, low-keyed performance as Condoleeza Rice, the filter between Bush and Blair, but she isn’t given very much to play. The few sparks that are struck are owed to Paul Essiembre’s silky smooth Dominique de Villepin, Nigel Shawn Williams’ conflicted and ultimately sabotaged Colin Powell, Andrew Gillies’ idealistic but wrong-headed Blair (more intense but less charming than Michael Sheen’s Blair in The Queen), and Sarah Orenstein’s very brief bit as a heart-wrenching Palestinian Academic who provides a pithy, powerful criticism of Mid-East politics.

   It seems to me that if Stuff Happens is to work best, it requires a much sharper, more penetrating portrayal of George Bush rather than the foolishly swaggering, machismo that Barry Flatman provides. In the original London version, the actor in this role showed how a boyish pretender became a cowboy president with a dangerous sense of divine righteousness. However, Flatman (who bears no physical resemblance to Bush) remains cartoonish—amusing but always shallow, the sort of caricature we can see on Saturday Night Live. It is left to Williams and Gillies to make up for this slack, and they do hit some high spots, with Williams suggesting Powell’s righteous anger, and Gillies sketching a Blair who is a fascinating mixture of inflated idealism and wry cravenness. But by mixing these two men with moronic Bush, Hare cannot really balance two sides of an argument. Hare’s news is that the phrase “war on terror” is so deliberately vague that it gives the Prime Minister and the President the freedom to do anything—including pre-emptive strikes—around the world. Hare also agrees with Powell that the U.S. has become a second Roman empire, with the same towering and ultimately self-defeating arrogance about its manifest destiny. Finally, Hare charges that a country’s leader is that country’s own fault—whether we are looking at Bush or Saddam Hussein. He is right, of course, but this news is old news, which is another way of saying that Stuff Happens is already showing its age.  

pic 1 (L-R): Andrew Gillies as Blair, Barry Flatman as Bush

pic 2 (L-R)(rear): Hardee T. Lineham as Cheney, David Fox as Rumsfeld

             (front): Nigel Shawn Williams (Colin Powell),Sarah Orenstein (Joyce Rumsfeld) 



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