One thing's for sure in 2007, we'll be hearing a lot about Tony Blair. And not just in the news columns either. Next week Channel 4 presents The Trial of Tony Blair: an Alistair Beaton satire envisioning the ex-PM's tribulations in the years ahead. And London's Tricycle Theatre has just announced that on April 23 (St George's Day, no less) it will open Called To Account: The Indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair For The Crime of Aggression Against Iraq. Blair won't be represented on stage. But he will be the drama's invisible protagonist.
The Tricycle show sounds fascinating. This is a theatre that has pioneered "tribunal drama": productions, like The Colour of Justice and Justifying War, that offered edited transcripts of judicial enquiries. This time the Tricycle has commissioned two leading lawyers, Philippe Sands for the prosecution and Julian Knowles for the defence, to interview a large panel of expert witnesses to decide whether Blair should be arraigned for war crimes. As before, the Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor will edit the transcript. What is unusual is that the Tricycle audience will act as jury and be asked to cast its vote.
I welcome anything that encourages debate. And, knowing the Tricycle, I am sure we won't simply get a dramatised kangaroo court. All the same, I wonder when, if ever, we'll get a play that examines Blair in all his psychological complexity.
So far he has been seen on stage largely as a buffoon. In Justin Butcher's The Madness of George Dubya he was Bush's slavering poodle. In Alistair Beaton's Follow My Leader he was a smugly, self-righteous hypocrite. Even in David Hare's Stuff Happens he came across as an image-conscious ditherer: in stark contrast to George Bush whom Hare portrayed as a canny politician whose impassive silences could easily be mistaken for gravitas.
But what I have yet to see is a play that takes Blair seriously: one that even portrays him as a tragic figure. By that I mean, as a politician driven by a genuine humanitarian fervour into taking foreseeable ruinous decisions. TS Eliot's Thomas à Becket says: "the last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason."
Blair's case is even worse: to do the wrong deed for, in his eyes, the right reason. It would also take a dramatist of real insight to analyse how Blair reconciles his religious conscience with the accumulating corpses in Iraq.
So far, the best portrayals of Blair I've seen came in Peter Morgan's The Deal and The Queen: both caught his strange mixture of calculating opportunism and self-belief. And Morgan might be the man one day to give us a full-length portrait of Blair as a haplessly deluded idealist.
But maybe, on second thoughts, Ibsen has done it already in The Wild Duck in the character of Gregers Werle: a tragic figure driven by a missionary fervour into destroying all he sees. Did Ibsen have the real key to Blair in a way that no TV satire or Tricycle enquiry can ever hope to match?
