Watching What I Heard About Iraq is like flicking between news channels. Comprised of reported speech and reported action, a montage of voices build up and tear down the Jericho’s Wall of lies surrounding the Second Gulf War. Adapted by Fountain Theatre and Skullduggery Theatre Company from an innovative article by Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books, it sadly fails to make great drama. On paper the voices have power; on stage they are relentless and irritating.

In a static staging five Everymen sit, stand and quote everyone from Barbara Bush to Harold Pinter, using the insistent, endless mantra of ‘I heard…’ They perch on perspex boxes, filled with emblems of the conflict, from bullet shells to newspapers - a reminder that this war was as much about the media as the military. They are dressed in a miscellaneous mixture of flack jackets, suits, leather jackets etc - they are us. Except most of the time they are sporting shaky American accents. While Tony Blair makes a couple of brief cameos, this is essentially a play about Evil America. As such it draws approving and knowing noises from its left-wing Edinburgh audience. For a play that trades heavily on righteous veracity, you can’t help feeling it’s actually a simplistic and worn-out polemic that is preaching to the converted. We’ve heard it all before.

The script is a slanted but informative summary of the war and the direct hit dealt to truth by the Bush administration. It is at its most powerful when it recounts American acts of torture - these still catch the breath with horror. But it’s the same chilling jolt you get when watching breaking news; actions are reported without time for analysis.

The play casts an uncompromising, cold light on to the Janus faces of our leaders. But it also shouts its own brand of propaganda. The Bush family emerge as a spitting image caricature, half way between the Munsters and the Mansons. What I Heard About Iraq also damages its political credibility with its only mention of Saddam Hussein portraying him as a broken, benign old man growing plants and reading books in his cell. Surely any serious political statement on the conflict cannot legitimately paint Hussein - a murderous dictator - with such a soft and simplistic brush. This leaves you with the uncomfortable feeling that some of what you have heard is Chinese whispers.

There are some voices here that raise themselves out of the noise - notably an Iraq-based American journalist whose accent and nationality, once passports, become chains. In a play about the power of lies, her terror and desperation at losing her freedom of speech form a rare and subtle inversion, highlighting how the truth can be strangled by a state of war. But despite this, What I Heard About Iraq does little to engage its audience in reflection, analysis or emotions deeper than shock and righteousness.