THE ARTS: Caryl Churchill's play about war, which opens here today, quietly foresaw the cruelty that emerged in Iraq, writes Belinda McKeon
It seemed familiar, somehow. Not the content, so much, but the form and the atmosphere. Watching Carole Coleman interview George W. Bush on Prime Time last week, I couldn't think for a moment just what it reminded me of. Coleman was asking questions of the president - difficult questions, unpalatable questions - at a pace that laid bare the scale of the problems following on from his administration's decision to invade Iraq. Simple though her questions were, they evoked images of bloodshed, slaughter, torture, terror and a spreading vulnerability, of a world in which nowhere, and nobody, is safe from harm.
And the president at first received her questions calmly, rolling out a set of polished answers; soothing, rationalising, even smoothly mocking the anxieties she expressed, repeatedly reassuring Coleman, and the viewers she represented, that the actions that worried them were being taken for their protection.
When Coleman began to question his explanations, to interrupt with the suggestion of contradiction, of elements that didn't quite fit, the president would grimace, or hold up his hand to stop her, and ask her to wait until he had finished, chiding her as if she were a child asking too many thorny questions of a grown-up who is concentrating hard on putting together an answer to keep the child quiet, to have the last word.
Bush was the Harper, I suddenly realised, and Coleman the niece Joan from the first act of Caryl Churchill's play Far Away, which has its Irish première at Project arts centre in Dublin tonight in a production by Bedrock theatre company. When the child Joan comes in to her aunt Harper, late at night, and tells her that she can't sleep, that she has heard and seen terrible things, outside, in the dark, her aunt moves quickly to pacify her, to dismiss her fears. That wasn't a human scream Joan heard, she insists; that wasn't a person she saw her uncle bundling into the shed. But Joan has more questions, and Harper has to modify her story, at every turn, to keep up; well, if it was a person, or persons, the uncle was pushing, it was for a party he was having, and if there was blood on the ground, it was because a dog was knocked over, a bad dog, and if there were children with bloody faces in the shed, being hit with a metal stick by her uncle, and bundled into a lorry where they cried . . . .
"You've found out something secret," says the aunt, when it seems she can dispute the evidence no more. "Something you must never talk about. Because if you do, you could put people's lives in danger." Not from Joan's uncle, she continues, but from the people he is beating. Besides, most of them are not being beaten but being helped. Joan's uncle, says Harper, is helping these people to escape. And some of them, even children, are traitors and have to be beaten. But Joan needn't worry about that. "You're part of a big movement now to make things better," her aunt tells her. "You can be proud of that."
Churchill herself, at 65 one of England's most vital and prolific playwrights, does not make these connections, render explicit these associations: in the tense, epigrammatic world of her play, they would be too crude, too definite, too restrictive. Besides, she wrote Far Away in 2000, before the real emergence of the issues that overwhelm us now, when places like Falluja and Abu Ghraib were largely unknown to all but those who inhabited them.
A short play in three acts that span decades in Joan's life, Far Away dramatises the paranoia and devastation of escalating warfare, of abuse, of the disintegration of humanity, with reference to no nation, no particular situation, and Churchill's vision of the worst of all wars is perhaps most terrifying in its absurdity; by the final act nature itself has been recruited to the conflict: fish, birds, animals, plants, even the elements themselves have taken sides as the world hurtles towards an annihilation from which, it seems, there will be no recovery, human or otherwise.
It's war, but not as we know it. It's the war the imaginative eye of Churchill has charted out of the disparate elements of contemporary global society. But the prescience is startling; nowhere more so than in the central scene, where a procession of "ragged, beaten, chained prisoners" is paraded across the stage. They are on their way to execution. But they are, too, the subjects of a sick game, the objects of their captors' amusement. Each of the prisoners wears an "enormous and preposterous" hat, created by the adult Joan and a male colleague, Todd. Every week, during the parade of doomed prisoners, a winning hat is chosen, and all hats but the winning one are destroyed - along with the prisoners.
As they work, Joan and Todd discuss their handiwork and lament the ones that have been burned along with the bodies. Only in mentioning those bodies do they make reference to the prisoners.
The audience, on the other hand, is forced to confront the reality of the prisoners' plight: it is on stage in terrible, vivid colour. For Jimmy Fay, the director of Bedrock's production, this tension between the denied and the undeniable is at the heart of the play, and it forms the fulcrum of his difficult task: to make it relevant without making it obvious. The difficulty of that task was brought home to Fay when he saw the images from Abu Ghraib earlier this year.
"We were already in pre-production with the play at that stage," he says, "and it just felt like an awful, horrible kind of serendipity. But this is the kind of society we live in, and we hide it. And America couldn't confront the reality of Guantanamo Bay. But suddenly you had digital photographs sent around the world. If that had just been words, that would have been ignored or been a very small piece in the paper, if anything. Just allegations. But now there was irrefutable proof, there were images, and people had to look at them and say, what do we do?"
In Far Away, as in reality, truth hits home in starkly visual terms. But Fay wants to push beyond the resonances that can be nothing but blatant and examine the complexity of the personal factors behind any situation of conflict. "I'm not interested in just saying to an audience, I vote Labour, Bush is wrong and that sort of thing. That's in newspapers, you can deal with that there." Theatre, he says, is for something different, for a chemistry that, when real events are bound to intrude on the consciousness, becomes all the more difficult to achieve.
"I remember 10 years ago, if you were doing a play, any play, it dealt with Bosnia. And now the new catchphrase is Iraq. Any play you do will be seen as dealing with Iraq, even if you don't dramatise the Muslim-Christian conflict, as something like Homebody/Kabul did." The reference to Tony Kushner's epic drama of an English family astray in Afghanistan is perhaps inevitable: that play's most memorable image also has to do with a subverted type of Easter parade, in which the Homebody, an idealistic middle-class housewife, piles up the hats she found in an exotic store, hats from the faraway Middle East, which she fell in love with and around which she has decided to throw a party.
In stark contrast to Churchill's characters, the Homebody's fascination is with the people who have been affected by the hats, who may have suffered to create them, and of the suffering people who wear hats like them. Her monologue, which was the only section of the play seen here two years ago at the Peacock theatre, is sensitive and evocative, political without sloganeering - which cannot, I put it to Fay, be said for the rest of Kushner's play. After the Homebody's husband and teenage daughter follow her to Afghanistan, where she has come on a whim only, it seems, to be stoned to death for her appearance, the attempt to understand another culture becomes strained, patronising; it descends first into cliché, then into farce.
And take away the dark humour and vicious caricature of another political work, Tim Robbins's Embedded, which played until earlier this month at the Public Theater in Manhattan, and what you're left with is a work that, although affecting, essentially preaches to the converted and seems guilty of the very crime of which it has accused those involved in the embedding of media during the invasion of Iraq: oversimplification.
How will Fay ensure that Far Away retains its political impact without backing it into a corner of the most predictable kind, without forcing it to say what the audience has most likely come to hear? By resisting the temptation to make such an assumption, he says. "I became more interested in the possibilities you don't immediately see. Like, what if the aunt is right, and she is protecting the child?"
To force Churchill into "wearing her heart on her sleeve", he insists, was never an option. "Something like The Madness Of George Dubya, which played last year in London, that's direct. But Churchill is being somewhat more poetic, and she is talking about the way people treat each other. Because the politics is in how I talk to you, in every move and every word."
