Jo Wilding fell into political activism almost by accident. Eager to give a would-be boyfriend the slip, she attended a talk about the effect of UN sanctions on the people of Iraq. She was so enraged to discover that 5,000 children a month were dying because of the sanctions that she threw a tangerine at Tony Blair and scored a direct hit. When a journalist asked her to verify her figures about the deaths and she couldn't, so she went to Iraq to find out for herself. She fell in love with the place and its people, returning for the invasion in 2003. How could she help?
Ever the maverick, Wilding decided to take a circus to make the children laugh amid the horror and the carnage, even though some observers sniped that the people of Iraq had already suffered enough without having clowns forced upon them. She detailed her time in Baghdad and Fallujah in a blog that eventually became a book, which has been adapted by Paul Hodson for stage. Sadly, a riveting story doesn't always make for riveting theatre.
This play should be galvanising because Wilding gets off her bum and does what most of us merely think of doing. And it asks hard questions: is making the children laugh enough when what they need are blankets to stop them dying from the cold?
But on stage it all seems rather stodgy, and it isn't helped by the fact that while Wilding and her clown troupe come across as admirable, they are also portrayed as irritatingly self-obsessed and unsympathetic. Wilding's relationship with her TV reporter sister, who publically endorses the war, is under-developed and soapy. In the end, the pictures from Iraq that are shown after the show, speak rather more eloquently than the previous two hours on stage. At Mylor Theatre, Truro (01872 262466), on 3 November. Then touring.
