In 2001, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice announced that Saddam Hussein had not developed any significant weapons of mass destruction. Within a year, members of the Bush administration were announcing that Saddam and Iraq were in possession of the most lethal weapons ever developed, while President Bush was claiming "you cannot distinguish between al-Qaida and Hussein". A year later, the invasion of Iraq began. How did Iraq go from being no threat at all, to one that demanded all the US's military might in the space of just two years?
What I Heard About Iraq is a theatrical collage based on Eliot Weinberger's London Review of Books article which uses nothing but the documented statements of politicians, soldiers and civilians to create a narrative dealing with the march to war and the continued occupation of Iraq.
Using only fully verifiable facts and quotes, it doesn't just raise one question, it makes you question just about everything you've heard and read. It tells you things that you thought you already knew, and reminds you of things that you once thought but had forgotten. And, in the case of Donald Rumsfeld, it quotes him saying things he later claims never to have said at all.
It's like watching someone trying to dig themselves out of a deep hole and only succeeding in covering themselves with sand. Played on an almost bare stage but for five glass boxes filled with bullets or discarded newspapers and magazines which the actors use as seats, and incorporating powerful images of everyday life in war-devastated Iraq, the show is staged with snappy simplicity by Hannah Eidinow.
Inevitably, it's quite static, and although you could argue that this is something that could perhaps be read just as well as staged, the use of actors' voices and body language lends a real immediacy, and heightens the clever juxtapositions of statements and facts. However many newspapers you've read, this is a show that joins up the dots in the narrative and reminds you that, in a world where it's increasingly difficult to know what to believe, you can't just take words at face value but must learn to read between the lines.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
