Stuff Happens
National Theatre, London

Tim Markham

There is a scene early on in David Hare's reconstruction of the political lead-up to the Iraq war in which, after Kofi Annan is introduced as an other-worldly figure with the voice of a meditation tape ('Imagine a pool of fresh, clear water…'), an unnamed journalist delivers a monologue in favour of the invasion.

What is remarkable about it is not that the pro-war position is given such eloquent and forceful prominence. Indeed, having publicly spelt out his own position many times over to anyone who would listen, Hare is studiously balanced, to the point of a pedantry which does nothing for narrative elegance and which occasionally sounds like the Today programme's more anxious attempts at impartiality: and now thirty seconds' airtime for the Tory spokesman. Rather, the scene stands out because it succinctly exposes as fatuous the entire premise upon which the pro/anti debate was slugged out. 'How obscene it is', he laments, 'how decadent, to give your attention … to the relentless discussion of the manner of the liberation … Do I like the people who did it? Are they my kind of people? … I trust Blair/I don't. Bush is stupid/Bush is clever. This obsession with ourselves!' In the space of a few lines we get to the heart of the narcissism which characterises a political discourse - on both sides of the debate - which has the appearance of looking outwards but is overwhelmed by a culture which equates politics with identification.

This lucidity is short-lived. The play quickly reverts to what can only be described as an animated version of the Guardian: there is, to be sure, a fleeting thrill at seeing the characters of this familiar but distant world brought to life, but it proves irretrievably insubstantial. The reliance on verbatim transcripts does lend the production a certain integrity, but this does not easily translate into dramatic interest.

While Hare could have played upon the precise lack of depth of a realist account of events, to excoriate the vapidity of media discourse in which events and people are only understandable in contrived 'dramatic' forms, he instead chooses to take that confected character template and flesh it out - which surely misses the point. The result is that any attempt at characterisation is constrained by the overriding objective of taking the dramatis personae of the journalistic construction of the political world and making them more human, more sympathetic. And while this characterisation does not for the most part play into easy caricature - Bush's self-possession is more in evidence than his inanity, Blair is more cunning than sanctimonious - it cannot go further than impersonation. By taking as his starting point these distorted reductions of political figures, Hare can neither develop characters who are believable beyond the world of the media, nor tackle why it is that the perceived character of these people means so much to us in the first place.

That said, there are strong performances from the cast, including Nick Sampson as Jonathan Powell, Adjoa Andoh as Condoleezza Rice and a meticulous study of Blair by Nicholas Farrell. Cheney and Campbell, meanwhile, are well deployed as comic foils, surfacing for brief moments to vituperate about one political enemy or another. Alex Jennings is broadly convincing as the US president, though more could have been made of Bush's bravado: here it is presented as unflinching and unreflective, while we've since seen that it can be so much more dramatically compelling: a dynamic mediation between stimulus and response, a negotiating tool, or at least a play for time. Perhaps most exhilarating are the whirlwind choreographed scenes at the UN Congress which, as well as depicting the world of diplomacy as a heady dance, compellingly illustrates the gap between those characters for whom politics is a maelstrom neither of their volition nor under their control, and those - Rice, par excellence - for whom every utterance slots into the whole machine with a satisfying click as the momentum of the official narrative proceeds seamlessly towards Iraq.

The sole tragic hero offered up is Colin Powell, who gets to make his principled stand against Bush before being summarily shunted out of the decision-making process. Having studiously avoided pronouncing heavy-handed judgement on characters throughout, this seems an odd device. In truth, the sense is almost that Hare is forgiving Powell, and declaring him to be, finally, moral - in keeping with much of the recent coverage of his stepping down. This sits uneasily with a world in which to talk about the morality of individual players makes no sense, given that these 'individuals' are nothing more than the vehicles necessitated by journalism's need for a story; indeed, Hare's point had earlier seemed to be that for us to speak in these terms is faintly absurd, the peculiar consequence of reducing politics to personality.

Ultimately, and frustratingly, the play fails to make use of the space between the two dramatic worlds of the news media and the theatre to convincing effect. It remains encumbered by the dictates of the former, neither making political capital out of its finitudes, nor transcending it for the sake of credibility in the latter.

Run over.