ArtwordBlog

David Hare’s documentary drama about the Bush administration’s descent into the maelstrom of the Iraq war, “Stuff Happens”, has been given a cracking-good staging by a relatively small Toronto company, Studio 180. The production, directed by Joel Greenberg, has been picked up by the Mirvish organization, and is now running at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

Judith and I make regular pigrimages to London to see just this kind of theatre – engaged, intelligent, smartly crafted, and brilliantly staged. It is significant that, in London, it is the large institutional theatres – the National and the Royal Shakespeare – that take the biggest risks, in contrast to the play-it-safe policies we so often see here.

Judith and I were in London when “Stuff Happens” was playing at the National’s largest venue, the Olivier, but the vagaries of repertory scheduling didn’t allow us to catch it. Now I don’t have to regret missing it. The Studio 180 production has the seemingly effortless clarity that I would have expected to see at the National.

The script is based to a large degree on documented statements, interpolated with scenes behind closed doors, where the dialogue has been invented. Since the characters are public figures, with so much of what they say and how they say it on the public record, the imagined conversations are entirely convincing, seemingly filling in the gaps between known quoted remarks.

The company, made up of actors all accustomed to play leading roles, achieves a lovely ensemble balance. The characterizations are sufficiently like the originals for us to accept the identification, without falling into the twin traps of imitation or caricature. David Fox as Rumsfeld, Michael Healey as Bush, Andrew Gillies as Blair, Hardee T. Lineham as Cheney, Guy Bannerman as Hans Blix, Richard Binsley as Wolfowitz, Anthony Bekenn as George Tenet, and Karen Robinson as Condoleeza Rice – they all resist the temptation go all Saturday Night Live on us, instead offering essentially sympathetic portrayals of the people we have seen so often on CNN. Joel Greenberg must have had quite a hand in achieving this level of consistency.

The production scoots along at a snappy pace that keeps surprising us, even though we have all lived through the events of the play, and know them all too well. And speaking of scooting, the primary staging device is an array of office chairs on wheels, used to great effect in creating instant changes of location.

Although cloaked in the guise of documentary, there is a powerful story being told here – the spiritual and political downfall of Colin Powell (played with great sensitivity by Nigel Shawn Williams). He stands for us, trying to do the right thing through compromise with the wrong people.  Ultimately, it is this core dramatic characterization that lifts “Stuff Happens” out of the realm of interesting information, and makes it the powerful drama that it is. The deftness with which David Have accomplishes this is the real achievement of his script.

The cumulative effect of all this is something that is unique to theatre. The live, real-time presence of the actors generates the double-vision effect of character and actor. The gradual movement from documentary to tragedy is native to theatre, as evidenced by Shakespeare’s histories. And the immediacy of the actors breaking through the fourth wall and addressing us, and our assumption that, as actors, they share the opinions of the playwright (even though the lines have been given to them to say), impacts us directly as individuals. With film and television, we are onlookers viewing something that was created at another place and in another time. We might as well not be there. In the theatre, we bear witness, and our agreement or disagreement is observable and audible – in subtle ways during the performance, and in our applause.