The Great Game: Afghanistan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Great Game: Afghanistan Lesley Ferris The Great Game: Afghanistan. By Richard Bean et al. Directed by Nicholas Kent and Indhu Rubasingham. Tricycle Theatre, London. “Part 1: Invasions and Independence 1842–1930,” 26 April 2009; “Part 2: Communism, the Mujahideen and the Taliban 1979–1996” and “Part 3: Enduring Freedom 1996–2009,” 24 May 2009. The Tricycle Theatre, located in northwest London, is known for its ambitious and politically engaged productions. The company, under the leadership of artistic director Nicholas Kent, is committed to making connections to its Kilburn neighborhood by producing work that reflects the cultural diversity of its community. For Kent, however, that community is both local and global. In addition to presenting plays written by black, Asian, Irish, South African, and Jewish authors, the theatre commits itself to confronting contentious contemporary issues by using the techniques of verbatim theatre developed in conjuction with the theatre’s pioneering and self-described “tribunal plays.” The Tricycle initiated the tribunal play concept in 1994 with its production of Half the Picture, which utilized the Scott Arms-to-Iraq Inquiry as its source document. This work, which journalist Richard Norton-Taylor and playwright John McGrath adapted for the stage, was the first play to be presented at the House of Commons and won a Freedom of Information Campaign award. Since then, Norton-Taylor has continued a productive relationship with the Tricycle, going on to edit judicial inquiries for the stage. One celebrated, award-winning work was The Colour of Justice (1999), a reconstruction of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. (Lawrence was a black teenager murdered by a white gang in Southeast London in 1993; five suspects in the case were never convicted.) Others include Justifying War (2003), based on the Hutton Inquiry (the investigation into the death of David Kelly, the weapons expert who supported the British government’s commitment to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), and Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry (2005), a work that drew on a new, government-sanctioned inquiry into the 1972 civilian killings by the British army in Londonderry. All of these plays opened to critical acclaim; the first two transferred to the West End, and all were presented on the BBC. In April 2009, the Tricycle Theatre produced what is surely its most ambitious project to date, The Great Game: Afghanistan, an eight-hour epic presented in three parts. While the work is not technically a tribunal play, it does serve as a trial of sorts for Britain’s century-and-a-half-long engagement with Afghanistan. Kent explains in the program that he felt that comparatively little attention was paid to Afghanistan after 9/11, but that in 2008, he noticed a slow though steady shift toward Afghanistan as the insurgency strengthened and more British soldiers began losing their lives. Kent believes that Afghanistan will be the central focus of British as well as European and US policy during the next decade, and he notes that there has been little public debate about it, and even less artistic response. Kent describes how he felt ignorant about why Britain was in Afghanistan and decided to think of ways to approach this topic onstage. He recalled two theatre events that served as models. The first was a work he produced in 1993, Love Song for Ulster by Bill Morrison, a trilogy that examined the politics of Northern Ireland. The success of this daylong theatre experience was reinforced when Kent attended the Royal Shakespeare Company’s staging of Shakespeare’s complete history cycle in an eight-week season at London’s Roundhouse Theatre in April 2008. Kent’s second model was the Tricycle’s ten-minute play festival (2007) addressing the crisis in Darfur. Combining these two models, Kent’s initiating structure for The Great Game: Afghanistan was a daylong event using various playwrights, with plays ranging from short, five-minute verbatim pieces to longer works of about forty minutes. The work consists of twelve ‘long’ plays and six short ones clustered in three groups; audiences could view the entire work in one day or else over a three-night period. Likewise, each section stands on its own and could be viewed without...