If Andrew Gilligan dreams, this was surely the stuff of his unconscious: President George Bush, a wily manipulator more exercised about an abstract "war against terror" than about finding Osama Bin Laden and the truth; Tony Blair going along with the commander-in-chief; and a bunch of aerial photographs that might have shown WMD factories in Iraq, or might not have done. I'm no war hack, but on the first night of Stuff Happens, David Hare's new play at the National Theatre, I, too, found myself waiting for the familiar phrases. They soon came: "war against terror", "axis of evil" and even the dreaded dossier appeared early on.
Could Hare have had a more appreciative crowd? Each time they heard something familiar - Bush's homely anecdotes, Blair's flowery speeches - everyone laughed, or at least breathed a sigh of acknowledgement. Weedy jokes about how jejune the Bush rhetoric is got a riotous reception, as if left-wing London had never heard anything so right-on. When little Jack Straw stepped up to the microphone, he was just laughed at, full stop.
Nothing was challenged, no surprises were sprung. With the exception of one masterly speech by the British foreign policy adviser David Manning, who used the full Hare arsenal to question why we find it so hard to envisage democracy in an Arab nation, this was a play apparently culled from the cuttings, whose only aim seemed to be to give a certain type of audience a comfy night out at the theatre. "It's just gotta resonance," said Bush about the "axis of evil", but it could have been an explanation from the playwright.
I wondered what had persuaded Hare to write Stuff Happens. Rather like Geoffrey Rush, who charmingly admitted that it was flattery that got him to play Peter Sellers in a forthcoming biopic, it might well have been vanity, combined with a somewhat childish wish to play out hitherto imagined situations on the Olivier stage. He must have known that a nice big auditorium, a good box office and lots of lovely column inches were in the offing. Not for Hare the off-Fringe dumping ground that edgy political theatre usually hopes for: this was always going to be the chattering-class event of the autumn, with some papers putting out cheeky pre-first night reviews and others devoting space to considerations of whether cheeky pre-first night reviews should be allowed. Just before the curtain rose, Hare and his director, Nicholas Hytner, had an entire segment on BBC Radio 4's arts programme Front Row.
It certainly couldn't have been the intricacies of the historical events that appealed to Hare, as there didn't seem to be any. This is no Democracy, Michael Frayn's masterly analysis of Willie Brandt's chancellorship, whose story made your head spin. Nor does it have the climactic structure of The Permanent Way, Hare's devastating portrayal of the rail fiasco. In the interval, I started chatting in the Ladies. One woman turned round and said: "It's pretty one-sided, isn't it?"
I can't tell you much about what happened after that, because I decided to slip away before the end. It's not that the performances or the staging were tiresome. I think it was the wearisome atmosphere engendered by hundreds of people in the audience mentally confirming previously held attitudes. And you'll never find that from a war council envisaged by Shakespeare.
