Written and directed by Robbins, and performed by his company, The Actors’ Gang, Embedded, together with David Hare’s new play, Stuff Happens, has been seen as evidence of a renaissance in political theatre, carrying on from the Tricycle Theatre’s hit Guan- tanamo and Alistair Beaton’s musical romp Follow My Leader. Yet Robbins’s mix of pile-driver satire and sledgehammer sentiment crushes this enthusiasm by making one thing appallingly clear: just because you are on the side of the angels, it doesn’t mean you are any good. Just because your sympathies are true, it doesn’t mean your aim is.
Robbins certainly represents the admirable face of Hollywood, his upfront activism refreshing at a time when most stars prefer to invoke the tedious old get-out clause that they’re actors, not politicians. His outspoken sense of justice has seen him attacked by the neocon establishment, yet despite his brave commitment, the nicest thing you can say about Embedded is that, with all its incoherent shouting, graceless stomping and un- coordinated running about, it’s a passable evocation of a war zone.
Focusing on the journalists “embedded” with the military, and the way in which some of them became complicit with their censors — they are shown swaying along at press conferences, as if they are at a Barry Manilow show, microphones in the air like lighters — the play tries to tell the story of the war from the point of view of soldiers while rebuking journalists and politicians. Families of soldiers weep over their loved ones; two privates fall in love while on patrol; poignant letters from home are read out as lives are ruined. Meanwhile, the journalists swallow the stories they are fed by the fearsome Colonel Hardchannel (VJ Foster). The rescue of Private Jen Jen Ryan (Kaili Hollister, a thinly veiled Jessica Lynch) becomes propaganda, and the politicians gather in a sinister cabal, lurking behind grotesque masks and transparent pseudonyms — RumRum, Woof — as a squawking chorus of neocon thugs who worship the theorist Leo Strauss and become aroused at the thought of war. Embedded has dance routines, video montages, lots of actorly multitasking — yet, for all the vigour, the serious bits are painfully mawkish, the comic bits embarrassingly unfunny, the politics lumpen and trite.
The problem here is not only the unevenness of tone, it’s the way Robbins succumbs to the rhetoric of “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” that was so poisonous about the American government after 9/11. The “ordinary people” — lowly soldiers, their families, “good” journalists — are pure, noble, human, while the poli- ticians are hideous cartoon harpies. Portraying the Washington powermongers as lurid grotesques makes them so much less dangerous, so much less of a threat, than their real selves.
Hare realises this: you only have to see Desmond Barrit’s liverish Dick Cheney or Adjoa Andoh’s snappish Condoleezza Rice in Stuff Happens to know their disturbing power, political Termi- nators in human skin. Comparing Hare and Robbins is like comparing a highly trained brain surgeon with a teenager piercing his ear with a cork and a needle. In Hare’s version of the events leading up to the war in Iraq, he does something that Robbins would never contemplate: he gives a true voice to the other side. One of the earliest “viewpoints” in the play, delivered by Angus Wright, silences the audience: “How obscene it is, how decadent, to give your attention not to the now, not to the liberation, not to the people freed, but to the relentless, archaic discussion of the manner of the liberation.
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” There are no musical numbers, no multimedia tricks, just a ring of actors playing out this drama in measured tones.
Yet while Robbins’s play suffers from an excess of passion and no intellectual substance, the National Theatre’s production of Hare’s play, by its director, Nick Hytner, has the reverse problem. Hare’s painstaking research, carefully incorporated eyewitness accounts and precise imaginings of “behind closed doors” action leave the play with the dramatic impact of a Crimewatch reconstruction. The point of such a measured retelling is hard to divine — aside from the depiction of Hans Blix as a genial old man hiking in Patagonia with his wife, there’s little theatrical flair and the nature of the events rules out any suspense — but its elegance sweeps you along. Hare’s daring is not in broad satire and zany antics, but in his careful depiction of moral grey areas, in Colin Powell’s forced complicity (powerfully portrayed by Joe Morton) or in Tony Blair’s tan-gible sense of frustration.
The performances are accordingly strong and subtle. Nicholas Farrell’s prime minister is not just a Rory Bremner impersonation, he’s a man who has overstretched himself and nightmarishly comes to realise it. At one point, his friend George asks for examples of the political problems he’s suffering on the home front: “Well, for example, I know it sounds silly, but fox-hunting. Also, there’s something called Railtrack.” Suddenly, he has the status of a little bird picking meat out of the teeth of a crocodile.
Alex Jennings plays Bush with a deft accuracy, moving about like a man who is bewildered by oppos-able thumbs, looking for his cues from his handlers like a sitcom dog. No matter how liberal the playwrights or the audiences, both reserve a special sneer for Rice — an appropriate updating of the old misogynist cliché of the battleaxe. Andoh’s “Condi” and Bush have a strangely close relationship — she is more mother looking after her child than adviser, a dynamic Hare quietly enhances.
While Embedded feels like old hat, it seems too soon for the complex overview Hare is attempting. Iraq might have given people a fresh appetite for political theatre, but unless a better balance can be struck, it won’t be long before audiences are scouting round for musicals and romantic comedies again. War might be hell, but through their good intentions, Hare and Robbins have transformed it into a curious type of purgatory.
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Embedded, Riverside Studios, One star
Stuff Happens, Olivier, National Theatre, Three stars