Nicholas Hytner takes over at the National Theatre in April with Shakespeare's morally charged Henry V. Whatever the state of the war we are in, this play, like so many of Shakespeare's histories, holds up a pitiless mirror. If Tony Blair thinks of Shakespeare at all these days, he should be contemplating the question Henry V asks himself about the English plan to invade France: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?"
Shakespeare's first act is about a leader searching for justification for a military expedition. It is chillingly modern in its use of sophistry and rhetoric to underpin a war that has already been decided upon.
In Act IV Shakespeare's human sympathy and awareness of all the perspectives of any action blaze out. The king disguises himself and goes among his soldiers on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. There he meets a soldier called Williams. Henry tests him by saying: "I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable." "That's more than we know," says Williams, speaking for all of us, who don't know what intelligence the government may have and won't share. Then Williams plunges us into battlefield carnage: "But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, 'We died at such a place' . . ."
From its origins, the theatre seems to have had a vocation to bear witness to war. The two greatest plays about war in the ancient world, Aristophanes's anti-war sex comedy Lysistrata and Euripides's Trojan Women, were both written and staged during the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta. Lysistrata, in which the wives of both sides give up making love until their men give up making war, hit the Athenian stage in the 20th year of the war. The Trojan Women was written, rehearsed and staged during the Greek expedition to Melos, whose citizens the Athenians massacred. Audiences moved by Euripides's play to sympathise with the women of the Trojan war would have found it hard not to compare them with the widows their soldiers had made in Melos. Moves are afoot to stage Lysistrata, at least in a rehearsed reading, before the war actually starts.
The theatre isn't good at what in American nuclear terms is called "quick reaction alert". One shining exception - Justin Butcher's The Madness of George Dubbya - might goad others to move as fast. Butcher's play, a wild and serious riff on Dr Strangelove, is Aristophanic in spirit, moving from riotous comedy to the gravity of a keynote speech by the Iraqi ambassador, which brings home the terrible human consequences of the military follies.
To find this play, I headed for Theatro Technis in Camden Town, north London, and took my seat in a packed audience of 80 people. Unlike our QEII-size national companies, this theatre can change course and decide to write and stage a war play with the agility of a tiny tug.
The Madness of George Dubbya was written in 72 hours after Christmas, and rehearsed in six days. The cast members' zest, energy and spontaneity belie the fact that they are working on minimal wages.
There's not much quick reaction alert in television either, except as a journalistic medium. We are about to suffer a glut of "our own correspondents", pluckily speculating on information that will be tightly controlled by the MoD. Too much reporting - or, very often, time-slot-filling for lack of hard news - blunts the brain, stunts the senses. The rituals of the news briefing, the videos, the charts, the sanitised rhetoric of official spokespeople, decimate language, debase the grand idea of performance. What we want on television as well as the stage is real drama. But what would it displace in the schedules?
Which head of TV drama is shelving the next lavishly designed classic revival or hip gangster series to make way for new, quickly written plays about the miasma into which we are daily getting deeper? Why can't such plays be put out no longer than a month after completion, or sooner, if the play is broadcast live, as all TV drama was at its outset?
Rory Bremner, John Fortune and John Bird are surely rolling up their sleeves at this moment, but the situation demands more than sharp weekly satire. It needs the arc of tragedy as well, the empathy of the imagination. It needs the rudeness of Aristophanes - his huge erotic energy, his outrageously dirty mouth. When the world seems to be going to hell in a militarised handcart, who can be bothered to fuss about four-letter words? People want to be shocked awake from their nightmares. They want drama to put the finger on the middling actors in office, the grim-faced ghosts in seats of power, about to create thousands more ghosts. They want to keep the human reality of the imminent victims in their minds and hearts. Where are the playwrights writing about the widows of Baghdad now? Will they even try, if they don't believe there's any chance of quickly getting their work on to the stage, on to the box?
Michael Kustow is a writer and producer
The Madness of George Dubbya is now at the Pleasance Theatre, London N7 (020 7609 1800) until 23 February
