There have been plays, such as David Hare’s Stuff Happens, that examined the causes of western intervention in Iraq. Stephen Brown’s adaptation of Rory Stewart’s 2006 memoir of his time as a provincial governor in post-Saddam Iraq is one of the first to look at the actual consequences. The result is instructive, enlightening and very well staged by Simon Godwin but, at 105 minutes, it leaves too little time to pursue the questions that it raises. For once, I wished a play had been much longer.
Stewart – currently seeking re-election as a Tory MP – is the pivotal figure of the story. Having been a diplomat and foot-slogging explorer of the Middle East, he volunteers his services to the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2003.He is deputed by its chief, Paul Bremer, to go to the south to Maysan and help create a modern, secular Iraq. The play charts his attempts to impose a democratic structure on the province’s hostile factions.
At one point, Stewart complains of being bombarded with “a torrent of information” and the audience is in much the same position. To be fair, Brown does a decent job of untangling the complex threads of a chaotic situation. Stewart first has to face the demands for jobs, electricity and wages for the police. His prime task, however, is to create a council that will reconcile the followers of a tribal sheikh, Karim Mahood, and a radical Islamist cleric, Seyyed Hassan. In the short term, he succeeds and even creates elections for the post of a locally appointed governor. What is achieved in the long term is open to debate.
Such is the helter-skelter rush of events, however, that there is no time to air the big issues. Can democracy be created by outside agencies? Do occupying forces inflame an already tense situation? What moral authority does the west have for nation-building? I appreciate that Stewart, in the heat of the moment, had little opportunity for abstract speculation. But, while Brown’s play effectively recreates the nightmarish conflicts Stewart faced, it would make better drama if it viewed his story in a wider historical perspective. It tells us what happened. It doesn’t explore its larger political significance.
Godwin’s production, however, has a hurtling energy and makes good use of the auditorium to confirm Stewart’s point that politics in Iraq is often a form of theatre. Henry Lloyd-Hughes admirably captures Stewart’s youthful mix – he was only 30 at the time – of outward confidence and inner uncertainty. There is strong support from Silas Carson as the lordly Karim and Johndeep More as his clerical antagonist, and from Vincent Ebrahim as a harassed professor and Aiysha Hart as his progressive daughter seeking to improve the lot of Iraqi women. The play heightens our awareness of the hazards of foreign occupation, but drama ultimately depends on the conflict of ideas as much as the recreation of actual events.
• Occupational Hazards is at Hampstead theatre, London, until 3 June. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
