Rules of engagement: Can you pack the bloody history of Afghanistan into a dozen half-hour plays? (UK)
Were one to measure the extent of controversy aroused by a piece of theatre against the time taken to perform it, Caryl Churchill's recent 10-minute offering at London's Royal Court must have set some kind of record. Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza was staged as the Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip was still going on, and one review read more like a rebuttal drawn up by the Israeli information ministry than a serious attempt at theatrical criticism.
But whatever its merits, the Churchill play was confirmation that political theatre, often as up to date as the headlines on the evening news, is making inroads in London. The uproar caused by Richard Bean's England People Very Nice at the National – is it an uproarious satire on immigration, or simply racist? – is still reverberating. And at the same venue, David Hare has only just finished dismantling New Labour every night in Gethsemane. But the veteran in this genre is Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, who is almost journalistic in his desire to pursue contemporary issues – so much so that his path and mine have crossed more than once.
When I covered Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of the weapons scientist David Kelly, and the alleged "sexing up" of the intelligence dossier that led us into war in Iraq, Kent was there every day too, and I assumed he was working for another newspaper. A few months later, I saw his distillation of the key testimony at that inquiry, edited down from thousands of pages of transcript. It was the same with the Bloody Sunday inquiry in Northern Ireland: what journalists like me sought to convey in print, the Tricycle endeavoured to put on stage.
The Tricycle has been presenting this cool, Brechtian style of work, which Kent has dubbed "tribunal" or "verbatim" theatre, since 1994, when the Scott inquiry into arms sales to Iraq was recreated. The most celebrated example, The Colour of Justice, consisting of excerpts from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, also played in the West End and at the National Theatre, toured and was shown on BBC2. But the Tricycle does not get all its scripts from the official Stationery Office.
Kent was commissioning short, pungent political pieces in the manner of Seven Jewish Children as long ago as 2006, when he staged a series of plays about the Darfur crisis. The longest lasted 20 minutes and the briefest only five. "This is a bit more free than verbatim theatre," he says. Now he has turned his attention to Afghanistan, and once again our courses have intersected. As I watched him rehearsing Black Tulips, a 30-minute play by David Edgar which imagines a briefing given to the Soviet troops who invaded the country in December 1979, I remembered being on the foreign news desk of the Financial Times the day it happened, trying to make sense of the scrappy reports coming in on the teleprinter.
Black Tulips is one of 12 half-hour plays the Tricycle has commissioned under the overall title The Great Game: Afghanistan, exploring the history of Great Power involvement there since 1842, when the first British Army to invade this beautiful, violent country was wiped out almost to a man. That was the first attempt to modernise Afghanistan by force, and there have been several more since. Arguably, we are in the midst of the latest such project: in his play Edgar, by holding back mention of the Soviet Union, emphasises that the Nato forces now in the country could have received much the same assurances about being there to help the Afghan people. "It also makes the point that soldiers have more in common with each other than with their governments," the playwright told me later...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
But whatever its merits, the Churchill play was confirmation that political theatre, often as up to date as the headlines on the evening news, is making inroads in London. The uproar caused by Richard Bean's England People Very Nice at the National – is it an uproarious satire on immigration, or simply racist? – is still reverberating. And at the same venue, David Hare has only just finished dismantling New Labour every night in Gethsemane. But the veteran in this genre is Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, who is almost journalistic in his desire to pursue contemporary issues – so much so that his path and mine have crossed more than once.
When I covered Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of the weapons scientist David Kelly, and the alleged "sexing up" of the intelligence dossier that led us into war in Iraq, Kent was there every day too, and I assumed he was working for another newspaper. A few months later, I saw his distillation of the key testimony at that inquiry, edited down from thousands of pages of transcript. It was the same with the Bloody Sunday inquiry in Northern Ireland: what journalists like me sought to convey in print, the Tricycle endeavoured to put on stage.
The Tricycle has been presenting this cool, Brechtian style of work, which Kent has dubbed "tribunal" or "verbatim" theatre, since 1994, when the Scott inquiry into arms sales to Iraq was recreated. The most celebrated example, The Colour of Justice, consisting of excerpts from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, also played in the West End and at the National Theatre, toured and was shown on BBC2. But the Tricycle does not get all its scripts from the official Stationery Office.
Kent was commissioning short, pungent political pieces in the manner of Seven Jewish Children as long ago as 2006, when he staged a series of plays about the Darfur crisis. The longest lasted 20 minutes and the briefest only five. "This is a bit more free than verbatim theatre," he says. Now he has turned his attention to Afghanistan, and once again our courses have intersected. As I watched him rehearsing Black Tulips, a 30-minute play by David Edgar which imagines a briefing given to the Soviet troops who invaded the country in December 1979, I remembered being on the foreign news desk of the Financial Times the day it happened, trying to make sense of the scrappy reports coming in on the teleprinter.
Black Tulips is one of 12 half-hour plays the Tricycle has commissioned under the overall title The Great Game: Afghanistan, exploring the history of Great Power involvement there since 1842, when the first British Army to invade this beautiful, violent country was wiped out almost to a man. That was the first attempt to modernise Afghanistan by force, and there have been several more since. Arguably, we are in the midst of the latest such project: in his play Edgar, by holding back mention of the Soviet Union, emphasises that the Nato forces now in the country could have received much the same assurances about being there to help the Afghan people. "It also makes the point that soldiers have more in common with each other than with their governments," the playwright told me later...