Pleasance
Courtyard, Edinburgh
August, 2006
****
It's not often that you encounter a play
adapted from an article in the London
Review of Books, but Simon Levy and director Hannah Eidinow have
turned Eliot Weinberger's essay into a compelling piece of theatre. It
is closely related to, but not entirely within, the growing verbatim
genre: the five performers recite a series of more or less direct
quotations, each prefaced along the lines of "On such-and-such a date I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say...". The effect is to build not just an
indictment of the contradictions, evasions and propaganda fed to us on
the subject of Iraq, but also a testimony to the ordinary civilian who
has been crammed with it all and still remembers remark A even when
diametrically opposed remark B is trotted out. It implicitly
characterises all this verbiage as an insult to both our intelligence
and our status as the citizens from whom this abused political power
derives.
The piece is not flawless. It contains a few factual errors, it is not
above using the "I heard..." chorus in an agitprop crescendo, and
occasionally the preface is missing altogether, from segments such as
logs of prisoner abuse or attacks on military, data which may be in the
public domain but do not make it into the mainstream of "I heard"
reportage. Nevertheless, it effectively and unostentatiously overcomes
any sense of "Iraq fatigue" with which one may have entered the theatre.