Thesis Template

Political Representation in Modern English Drama:

A Study of Selected Plays

Muhannad Albayk Jaam

Supervisor

Prof. Munzer Absi

Thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in Literary Studies

English Department

University of Aleppo

Political Representation in Modern English Drama:

A Study of Selected Plays

Abstract

Politics plays an important role in modern English drama, and the relation between politics and drama is an ancient one. This thesis examines how such a relation culminates in an integration to the extent that the term ‘political drama’ has come to refer to the flamboyancy and showmanship of politicians, and the drama produced within the context of politics. Examining the historical roots of politics and drama through a historical survey in the first chapter yields interesting results. The witness plays, Karen Malpede’s Prophecy, Simon

Stephens’ A Canopy of Stars, and Lydia Stryk’ American Tet are examined in the second chapter. An analysis is provided of the particulars of political stagecraft in the third chapter, comparing two plays, reality-based Bill Cain’s 9

Circles, and verbatim play Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain’s Guantanamo:

Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.

iii

Disclaimer

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person, or material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of a university or the institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis.

Signed:______

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to my family and friends, who have always been there for me at all times. I hope that my efforts will make you all proud of me. I would like to thank Professor Munzer Absi for his constant support throughout the period of my knowing him, and for simply being the great person that inspires all those around him. I would also like to thank my MA course professors who are the reason that I was able to get to this point. Special thanks go to Drs. Iman

Lababidi, Bashar Aqili, Muhammed al-Taha, Arwa Fakhoury and Yahya al-

Fadel. I would like to thank all the doctors and teachers at the English department, as they have contributed to shaping my efforts and endeavors, and especially Mrs Rana Doori, Dr. Zafer Seiba, and Dr. Rida Anis.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Appendices ...... vii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 A Historical Survey of Political Drama: From Ancient Times to Modern Milestones...... 7

Chapter 2: The Theatrical Response to the Trauma of Wars and Witnesses as Portrayed in Karen Malpede’s Prophecy, Simon Stephens’ A Canopy of Stars, and Lydia Stryk’s American Tet ...... 30

Chapter 3 Analysis of Reality-Based Political Drama: Guantanamo and Nine Circles...... 63

Conclusion ...... 86

Works Cited...... 89

Works Consulted...... 96

List of Appendices

Appendix I: Brief chronology, 1953—1989

vii Albayk Jaam | 1

Introduction

Since times immemorial, the relation between the dramatic medium and political concerns has stood undeniable. The stage has always been the place where such concerns and issues were laid for inspection. In the history of theatre, there is a long list of enactments addressing issues of current events that are central to society itself and those very enactments aim at raising consciousness and social change.

Politics and drama are related to the extent that the term “political drama” is used to describe not only the genre of stage productions, but also to refer to the propaganda and eloquence of politicians.

Playwrights often portrayed historical events and characters that were important or widely known at the time. Shakespeare is such an example, since he based many of his plays on historically important figures, such as kings and army leaders. This practice existed in the past and continues to be used even in our modern day world. Political Theatre challenges the audience’s own beliefs and encourages them to assess their own moral values critically. The most rewarding type of theater is one that stimulates thought and leaves people talking about the play for hours, days, or even years. Famous playwrights from different places such as Shakespeare, Bertolt

Brecht, and Arthur Miller all wrote political plays. Political themes will continue to be an important topic on the stage because the theater is an ideal place for compelling stories about the complexities of the world.

Modern English drama has taken a turn into politics in response to the increasing political and military involvement of the English and American governments in foreign countries, particularly, countries such as Iraq and

Albayk Jaam | 2

Afghanistan. Modern theaters also produced plays centering on the themes of terrorism, with major historical events, such as 9/11, being dwelt upon in several forms of literature. Other plays focus on the battle between generations, and in extension, the ruling parties and the working parties. Such plays include depictions of capitalism and socialism, with the antagonist being the former. This results from the recent rise of the trend of socialism in the West. Plays about the battle of generations and their differing traditions can be sometimes political in the sense that the political ways of the ruling party, which usually belongs to the old generation, or the predominant political policies of the country are not sufficient for the young rising generation, and thus require reform – at least from their perspective. Such concerns and many others have become a common theme in modern plays. Being about politics, political theater includes post-colonial echoes as well. This is the case for playwrights of foreign nationalities or advocates belonging to certain backgrounds or ideologies. However, being contemporary in nature, and more often than not, addressing more or less current issues, it is more relevant to deal with the up-to-date themes of these dramas. In order to define the theme in question, political actions need to be considered. Thus, modern political drama can be defined as a broad genre containing subgenres, such as verbatim theater, reality-based theater, site-specific theater, with themes based on current political trends and decisions. This is why it is possible to consider modern drama as a representation of the world of politics.

Regarding the most relevant recent socio-political world, war and politics prove to be the most resounding themes.

Ranging from the Great Depression in America in the 1930s to post-Thatcher

Britain, playwrights have found plenty of material to portray and comment on throughout the last century. When it comes to wars, the involvement of America and

Albayk Jaam | 3

Britain in foreign affairs in the form of sending troops to fight battles have been the main impetus behind the theatrical representations of war and its consequences. It is a fairly controversial field, and it depends on which side represents the case being discussed. It is interesting, however, to examine how theater becomes a medium for expressing matters of political strife, and how it is possible for such dramas to have an impact of the world ruled by politicians and governments.

Examples of the strength of theater in depicting current events can be found in many works nowadays. In a world where humans become mere cogs in the enormous machines that rule countries, where numbers or initials on papers lying in the vast labyrinths of offices become the sole determiners of the meaning of individual to governments, one is left to wonder at what our future holds in store. If modern dramas of today are meant, like the ancient dramas and performances were once meant, to educate the public; if they actually succeed in doing so, then the theater is a mighty weapon in the face of propaganda. It is, however, a double-edged weapon. Political theater as a term is also used to describe the propaganda of the parties competing for the public’s admiration. In this sense, drama is understood to be a means of enactment. Enactment entails untruth, or at least the representation of untruth. It is quite interesting to trace how the emerging political theater strives to deliver its messages, whatever they maybe, to a cynical and doubtful audience or even an audience that is unable to comprehend the themes presented.

Due to the variety and relative recentness of the genre of political theater, it is reasonable to trace its history within the last century and into our modern day, where it forms a genre worth considering. The first chapter provides a brief history introducing some of the most important names, plays, and events in the history of

Albayk Jaam | 4 political theater. It is worth noting that the history of relatively modern theater can be traced far more back in time, with the possibility of starting at least fifty years before the twentieth century, when Bertolt Brecht and others, such as Henrik Ibsen, were active. It may even be traced back further back, if one were to examine the very roots, but such matters lie outside the scope of this study, in terms of length and relevance.

Therefore, the most convenient place of take-off stands at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This study is an attempt at gauging exactly to what extent drama can be regarded as political, and perhaps in doing so, shed some light on other aspects of this intriguing relation. The first matter to be investigated in this context is the relation of war and politics, being a relation that can be said to be quite ‘firmly’ established. It is obvious that waging war is mainly a political decision usually taken by higher ranking politicians. War in the traditional sense is an armed assault; it can be direct or may have other forms such proxy wars (where an army fights for foreign interests), or speech wars (such as those seen between the presidential candidates competing on behalf of their parties). Hence, the relationship between politics and war is an old one.

In Chapter One, a brief background of the history and modern-day views of political drama was discussed. The background formulates a much-needed background related to theater and politics. Such a background will help foster an ability to blur the imaginary lines between political drama in our daily lives. The chapter reveals that political drama often crosses the borders of the stage to come out into everyday life as people wade through the quagmire of politics and politically charged speech. For this reason, political drama becomes the modern vehicle of

Albayk Jaam | 5 expression for political views that may be upheld or frowned upon by different individuals or bodies.

Chapter Two is mainly focused on memory and witness drama, as it focuses on portraying the traumatic effect on war as well as how the modern stage responds to it in the form of political theater. The plays in question in this Chapter are Karen

Malpede’s Prophecy, Simon Stephen’s A Canopy of Stars, and Lydia Stryk’s

American Tet. The themes prevailing these plays are compared and contrasted to examine underlying relations. This process exposes common grounds including the morality of war, the grim nature of war, hypocrisy of politics, and the effect on the minds of the characters involved in them. Chapter Two also serves the part of relating modern war theater traditions to the ancient practices of having a theater dwelling on the matter of war and warriors. By establishing this link between the past and the present, various other gaps become bridged, such as that between politics and theater in ancient times.

Chapter Three makes a comparison between Guantanamo and 9 Circles in terms of technique and approaches to content. The playwrights in those plays take matters into their own hands, making theaters a stage where they aim to increase the awareness of the audience about political decisions and the bigger picture. The techniques range from verbatim to the less strict documentary representation. The plays attempt to use techniques taken from the field of politics as a means of fighting fire by fire to expose the hypocrisy, or as a way of employing the legitimate mechanisms of delivering reality. When it comes to themes, there are many common ones, such as those of false political propaganda, the corrupting effects of war, the scars the soldiers bear, empathy with the other, and memory. Modern political

Albayk Jaam | 6 representations in theatre, including the theater of war and witness, have come a far way, and are worthy of being independently categorized and studied.

Albayk Jaam | 7

Chapter 1

A Historical Survey of Political Drama: From Ancient Times to

Modern Milestones

The term “Political Theater” needs to be defined correctly, as it is a fairly recent one. In its modern day usage, “Political Theater” refers to drama or art, which sheds light on a political issue or issues through its theme or plot (Chambers, 613).

Actual performances of political theater date back to ancient times. The first examples of political theater include the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theatres, which were highly influential on public opinion in Greece. This Greek context shows how that the early plays performed in central arenas used for theatrical performances or amphitheatres, had predominantly religious themes and tackles gatherings. Dealing with such controversial topics at that time helped ancient playwrights come to the spotlight. Ancient Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes was a widely known in his day. He was one of the earliest recorded writers of political satire, as his plays mainly depict everyday life in Athens. Alfred Bates a British

Politician and author of The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence On

Civilization, offers an insight into the importance of Aristophanes:

In the plays of Aristophanes the whole panorama of Greek society passes

before us, each phase touched with the poet's inexhaustible humor. One play is

opened with a meeting of Parliament, and the whole machinery of government

is presented in caricature …. The proceedings of the law courts are continually

before us, and we are familiar with the ways of the smooth-tongued advocates

Albayk Jaam | 8

and the insolence of young lawyers, avoiding party questions, he rests the idea

of his plot upon general satire, exaggerating to a degree that passes anything

attempted in regard to politics, and the whole becomes a genial mockery of

human nature itself. (Bates, 55)

Aristophane’s plays mainly satirize prominent citizens and their behavior. One of his plays, Lysistrata, speaks about how the Athenian women rebel against their husbands as a means of forcing them to outlaw war. This play can be linked to a modern instance in 2003, where people in all over the world read Aristophane’s

Lysistrata as a protest against the possible war with Iraq. This is just one example of how even old political theater can still have its echoes throughout the ages.

The theatre of ancient Rome was diverse, ranging between mere tools used by the elite to productions driven largely by social and political forces. Furthermore, the theatre continued to serve as the only means through which the masses of the people were able to express their opinion on public matters (Abbot, 56).

The earliest form of theater in Britain may be traced back to least to 1296 and is called mummers theaters. It is a form of festivity where there is dancing, music, and silent acting. When the festivities for the marriage of Edward I's daughter at

Christmas included "mummers of the court" along with "fiddlers and minstrels"

(McCoig, 103). This fact proves that even the earliest forms of acting are related to the court and in turn to politics.

Theater in the Medieval Age is predominately religious, with Mystery Plays and Morality plays being the main type of theater. Such plays represented church sponsored themes and helped spread the agenda of the feudal system that was

Albayk Jaam | 9 integrated with the church at the time. In this sense, religion is politics during the

Medieval Age, something that applies to almost all of the known plays at the time.

Following the Medieval Age is the Renaissance, where theater flourished through the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and others. According to some scholars, the theater of Shakespeare can be categorized as political theatre since his plays examine the workings of the motivation of the characters that have the power to determine political activity. They also speak of the fact that many of his tragedies dramatize political leadership of characters driven by various motives (Montrose,

552).

Shakespeare wrote many historical plays, which are often regarded as Tudor propaganda since they portray the dangers of civil war while celebrating the founders of the Tudor dynasty. An example can be found in his plays, Richard III and Henry

VIII, with the former portraying the last of the house of York as a monster and the latter celebrating the birth of Elizabeth. Furthermore, Shakespeare relied for the content of his plays on Plutarch’s Lives. This work mainly emphasized the lives of important political figures. Overall, Shakespeare’s history plays and tragedies examine the importance of political leadership and lust for power in various forms. As

British dramatist Richard Eyre puts it:

Shakespeare is fascinated by politics, charting the world of secular power with

an avid curiosity, showing a very highly developed sense of the workings of

bureaucracy and power. [….] The world of bugged hotel rooms, the ever-

present secret police, the smug strutting arrogance of the Party's apparatchiks,

the friends who lower their voices and look about them before speaking, the

fear of prison, the familiarity with those who have experienced it, the

Albayk Jaam | 10

swaggering display of the privileges of the nomenklatura, these all belong to

the world that Hamlet finds so 'out of joint.' (Eyre)

In his book, Shakespeare’s Politics, American philosopher Allan Bloom assumes a classical view that politics play an essential role in shaping man's consciousness. Bloom considers Shakespeare a political dramatist, as he states that

Shakespeare’s plays are still relevant for the political concerns of our age (Bloom,

80). This further supports the resonating echoes that sound through the ages through political theater.

The prosperous time for the theater in the Renaissance soon came to an end due to the civil war and ensuing Cromwellian rule. In 1642, the theaters were closed by ordinance, which was all a result of political or religious actors aiming to control theater in Britain. This proves the fact that whether theater exists or not is largely connected to political factors, further supporting its importance as a tool for propaganda. In North America, the stage was still non-existent largely due to the same force of Puritanism that was prevalent at the time.

The revival of theater was during the Restoration age in 1660 after an eighteen-year hiatus imposed by civil war and Puritan government. This signaled not only a desire for stage plays, but also a specific taste for the theatre on the part of the new monarch, Charles II. He had been brought up in the 1630s witnessing the highly theatricalized court of his father Charles I, and was exposed to various kinds of theatre during his time in exile. Charles understood and appreciated the power of the stage as a source of both entertainment and political propaganda (Walkling, 1500).

This would later extend to affect plays in ways that depict the turmoil of incessant

Albayk Jaam | 11 power shifts through comedies of manner that mirror such fleeting changes within the interactions of the characters on stage.

At first glance, the eighteenth century appears to be the least interesting and significant period of theatre history. Some histories of theatre virtually omit it or view it as a connecting link. It is true that the eighteenth century produced few great dramatists, and the reasons behind such a decline are mainly political. In the relative security of England in the eighteenth century, the theatre was concerned with profits, and its profits depended on catering to the desires of bourgeois morality and the requirements of governmental control. However, theatres were mainly enjoying an unprecedented freedom in attacking government policy, which catered to the masses and helped all voice their problems with the governments. This lead to the Licensing

Act of 1737, which was the most important form of governmental control of theatrical activity. It was rushed through the parliament to put an end to unapproved theater, while allowing license to those that advance their agendas (Holland, 255). The same

Act would later be changed to be the Theatres Act 1843 still preserving the control imposed over theaters before being finally abolished with the Theatres Act 1968.

Drama in 18th century America was hindered by the Puritan tendencies until the 18th century when a number of English actors arrived and began staging plays

(Rea, 2). Even at its very origins, the theater was political, as the plays enacted were

Richard III and The Merchant of Venice later on. However, there were some theaters and plays already established before that would gain importance only later.

At the onset of the 19th age and preceding the Victorian age, the Romantic

English poets, among them Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley failed in their attempts to produce a drama that catered to the prevailing tastes, partly

Albayk Jaam | 12 because they were not willing to and partly because they were overshadowed by the older dramatic heritage, (Rea, 3). However, the Romantic ways of expression leave an effect on theater in the form of casting aside rules. Perhaps one of the contributing factors to the lack of Romantic drama is the restraints enforced by the Licensing Act.

Drama in the Victorian age was more open due to Queen Victoria’s reforms.

One such reform included the Theatres Act 1843 that led to theater being censored by the political powers. This led to Victorian theatre becoming an important means of raising patriotic feeling, a purpose that would continue well into the 19th century

(Rea, 3). The Victorian age was a time when many new theatres were built along with theatre schools. It was also a tune where theater openly portrayed dramas relating to social problems, signaling a trend towards realistic theater.

The achievements of realism at the end of the 19th century continued to resonate through the turn of the 21st century, but the most influential innovations in came from a vigorous reaction against realism. This reaction is accompanied by many political and other factors that affected the theater in ways never seen before (Rea, 3).

From the influence of Henrik Ibsen and Bertolt Brecht who turned to symbolism in their plays, to WWI and WWII, there was plenty of political material for playwrights all over the world. The domestic struggle between Capitalism and Communism as well as the Cold War all had lasting effects on the stage. It is during this century that the Theatres Act 1968 was issued cancelling censorship on the British theater. This explains the number of political plays produced during the century and also explains their importance given their recentness.

Bertolt Brecht, born in 1898, is one of the more important influences on political theater in the twentieth century. He challenges Aristotle's ancient approach to

Albayk Jaam | 13 theater as a spectator activity. Brecht tried to stimulate the minds of his audience, integrating various factors of economics and politics into his plays. He hoped that the audience would respond with their minds and not hearts. As Elizabeth Wright, a

British author and a critic, describes him:

He was a brilliant man of the theatre, highly receptive to the avant-garde of his

day, quick to improve it and somewhat too precipitate to turn it into theory. He

was a communist: not a left-winger, not a liberal, nor a humanitarian. From his

twenties onwards, he thought and worked in terms of Marxist dialectic and he

really wasn't kidding. (Wright, 10)

Brecht is the father of what is known as the “epic theater”. This stage production relies on narrative, self-contained scenes, and rational argument to deliver a shock of realization to the spectator. Wright goes on to offer a look at Brecht's continuing role in political theater:

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Brecht was revered by left-leaning theatricals

as a sage whose slightest jottings could be relied on as a guide to morality,

politics and life itself. In the 1990s the collapse of faith in Marxism put a stop

to that. But although his Mao-like status hasn't lasted, his plays (or some of

them) have quietly entered the theatrical mainstream. Whether they've entered

as what they are, or in disguise, is harder to say. Some productions get praised

for following his thinking to the hilt, others get praised for throwing his boring

theories out of the window. Sometimes both are said of the same production.

(Wright, 50)

Albayk Jaam | 14

Although Brecht is not an English or American playwright, his plays would help political theater develop in the following century. It is during the twentieth century that political drama comes into its own. Political dramas become the main trend, with undeniable influence. In America, theater comes into its own at last in the twentieth century through playwrights like Arthur Miller who stand head and shoulders over other playwrights as a political avant-garde. He is most widely known for his play The Crucible released in the first half of the century, and which is political criticism in the guise of visit back to earlier prosecutions in American history. One notable mention of political drama activities in twentieth century

America includes the Federal Theater Project. The Federal Theater Project was created in 1935 and brought live theater to many who had never experienced it before.

Among the innovative projects created by the Federal Theater Project was the Living

Newspaper in which the headlines of the day were researched and dramatized. Topics in this series included political depictions of the fall of Henri Christophe’s kingdom in

Haiti in a play entitled Black Empire, and Triple-A Plowed Under that was about farmers’ troubles during the thirties. The legacy of Bertolt Brecht found its way into subsequent examples of political theater in the later part of the century. Foner explains in The Reader’s Companion to American History:

The cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s led to a new demand in some

quarters that theater be a vanguard of reform. Off- and off-off-Broadway

groups served up caustic political commentary, and groups such as Julian

Beck's Living Theatre combined radical politics with a revolutionary

breakdown of the boundary between spectator and performer. (Foner, 102)

Albayk Jaam | 15

Other examples of political theater such as that written by actor and activist

Tim Robbins who recently produced the play Embedded, a satire about war and the madness on the front lines in a Mideast conflict. Women are not absent from the stage with playwrights such as Sarah Jones, who is a writer and a performer and whose work strikes the eye of the American storm. Her work mixes humor and politics on the stage since she started performing a series of shows comprising of one woman.

Jones claims that she does not believe that art without politics can really exist, explaining:

I've never seen art for its own sake. Even Oklahoma!, as a piece of theater, is a

statement that we don't want to challenge the pleasantness of America: "We

like the story just as it is. We don't want to tell the story of the Trail of Tears.

(Shenk)

The year 1968 marked an important year for British theater as in that year the

Theatres Act 1843 was abolished and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office no longer had its control and censorship imposed. This act had required all plays to be submitted to and effectively censored by the state. The 1970s saw the emergence of a newly liberated political theater, not to mention the formation of many theater groups, which included actors, playwrights, and directors working collaboratively.

These circumstances would create an environment in which political work could flourish. This explains the sudden and recent surge in political theater that led to many new playwrights taking politics as the subject matter of their plays. There are many examples of such playwrights in the modern age, some of which include David

Hare who wrote The Vertical Hour and Stuff Happens, and other playwrights such as

Caryl Churchill that addresses the political stage from a feminist point of view

Albayk Jaam | 16 through plays, such as Cloud 9 and Top Girls. The absurdist tradition still lurks in some of the modern plays, especially those by Harold Pinter.

These playwrights and others take the lead in Britain in producing recent political stage productions. Their works tackle various socio-political matters, from economy and traditions to war and involvement in international affairs. Political drama in Britain responds to contemporary matters. This makes the genre highly relevant, and historical in some sense.

A major milestone for both American and British political theater comes in the form of the September 11 plane crash and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. These events are a reminder to people that politics matters and the theatrical response came in the form of political theater. The Tricycle Theatre in London provides several examples some of which include strict verbatim theatre, which involves reconstructed inquiries or interview-based plays found in Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's

Guantanamo. There are also even more fictional representations of real events such as

Bill Cain’s 9 Circles, which is a reality-based play. These works were highly influenced by journalist approaches and serve as important both on the stage and on paper.

The Arts Council in Britain did research that indicates there was a spectacular expansion in new writing in the subsidised theatre between 2000 and 2009. Much of that new writing consists of plays by young playwrights of different origins with women playing a major role. The plays are set in semi-fictional or fictional worlds.

Although the twentieth-century drama is the product of the individual playwright’s ideas and experience, there are often some shared general features found in common.

They share some beliefs and concerns for their work. They try to show on stage some

Albayk Jaam | 17 parts of the realistic picture of the daily lives of common people who are affected by war.

Some of this work is loosely based on reality, with much of it being fictional.

Examples include plays set in recognizable real world states with fictional characters in a world of imagined disputes. There are issue-based plays, in which playwrights imagine fictional situations in order to explore the human costs of immigration control and sex trafficking. In general, September 11 and war, with a particular focus on Iraq and Afghanistan remain the concern of some of the most influential modern theater. It is becoming a trend for young playwrights from widely diverse backgrounds to treat contemporary events by returning to the complexity and depth which only invented characters can provide.

All in all, modern theater and politics have become highly active during the last century and so share a link that is worth investigating. The relation, meaning and implications of the later part of this relation will be considered within this study. The aim being to analyze the elements of this relatively new genre and consider the relevance of the background, while determining the role of the author, and examining the techniques of stagecraft unique to this type of theater.

Having previewed the long-standing history of politics and theater, the task remaining at hand now is to place a further emphasis on the intricacies and inner workings of that relation which is only further cemented today. It is tempting to imagine political figures seen on media outlets talking, gesturing, arguing, and persuading as mere dramatis personae on a stage in a grand play. One cannot help but think of whether the whole world around us is a mere grand stage.

Albayk Jaam | 18

When the decision was taken to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was done by high ranking politicians. When terrorists crashed two planes in September 11, their goal was to send a message to politicians, who responded later with wars fought in

Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a world-changing decision ended the war at a high toll of human life. War in itself is a political choice, be it to leverage one side over the other, to display strength, to market weaponry, or any other aim. Drama, being closely linked to politics, is the best weapon to fight fire with fire. The silver-tongued politicians perched on their ivory towers are matched by skillful artists and master playwrights. It is also possible for the borders between the two to be blurred, with politicians presenting their agendas dramatically, and with theaters and actors politicizing their themes and forms. This makes the relation worthy of investigation, as will be the case in the rest of this chapter.

The question remains: how is drama related to both war and politics? Why is the term ‘political drama’ used to refer to both the genre and political shenanigans?

Why is the graphic representation of war becoming more and more prevalent today?

Movies can be exciting, thanks to the various effects implemented in them, but the same cannot be said about theaters. The relation between drama and politics must then stem from elsewhere. Having established the theme and background for the case, the focus can now move freely to consider two modern prevalent views about drama, in an effort to define and establish the relevancy of this genre.

Critic Peter Hall, an English theatre, opera and film director wrote in his book,

The Necessary Theater, “Theatre remains any society’s sharpest way to hold a live debate with itself. If it doesn’t challenge, provoke or illuminate, it is not fulfilling its function” (Hall, 25). This recognition is by itself enough to set an inquisitive mind on

Albayk Jaam | 19 journey for the truth of such a statement. If necessary theater is meant to be provocative or challenging, then it is natural to find such traits in political dramas addressing modern issues. The more recent an issue, the more of a sharp edge the play becomes. There are many plays written in the past that still live up to our days. The most rewarding theatrical pieces are those that stimulate thought, make room for discussions, and leave people talking about the play for hours, days, even years later.

As previously stated, many renowned playwrights wrote political plays. Political work will continue to be found on the stage because the theater is an ideal platform for communicating experiences that may be hard to express otherwise. Unlike television or the internet, where the viewer is in full control, pausing, muting, or replaying at will, theaters do not allow such luxuries. Spectators can see the actors live, and are left with no control but to sit and watch with care, lest they miss an important piece of the bigger puzzle that is the play they watch. There is a depth in theater, one that is needed for more serious themes, and politics fits the profile. Artist Tara Bracco writes about the power of political theater saying that:

I’ve always believed the creating and the producing of political theater to be

an act of leadership. Political artists take risks, tell stories people aren’t always

ready to hear, and hold up a mirror to reflect the realities – both good and

bad—of our society. Artists decide what stories get created, seen, and heard by

the public. They are actively shaping the culture around us, as theater raises

the antenna of people’s social and political consciousness. (Bracco)

What Bracco is referring to is that political theater is a form of leadership, one that involves taking risks. An artist portraying a certain political aspect might be prosecuted, leading to a variety of consequences ranging from defamation to

Albayk Jaam | 20 imprisonment. Bearing such risks in mind, it takes courage to direct a full play about political matters, where a word or representation might not appeal to certain parties.

Perhaps this is why political theater is booming nowadays, where liberty of speech is spreading and intellectual censorship is less common. Until very recently, artists had to keep in mind examples of what happened to playwrights such as Arthur Miller, who was imprisoned after his play The Crucible. One may even further argue that perhaps political drama is hated by some because of its consequences, while others fear its power.

When it comes to narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, they are quite effective in conveying political information. Narratives are used in political speeches and campaign advertisements because they are useful. Psychologist Drew Westen points to the power of narratives in her book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Westen, 43). Westen identifies the main components to creating a strong political story, a list which also includes the basics for any playwright. Found among the items on the list is fact that the structure should be easy to understand. There should be a protagonist and antagonist, and that the play should be emotionally memorable.

It is important to draw a line between politicians, who use factual narratives to invoke emotion and emphasize their points, and playwrights who use innovative stories to stimulate audiences into action. Howard Zinn, a renowned activist, states that artists who write fictional works have a greater freedom when it comes to creating content that challenges the status quo. “[Artists] can point to things that take you outside traditional thinking because you can get away with it in fiction” (Zinn,

70). In general, audiences will find plays questioning predominant thoughts more

Albayk Jaam | 21 palpable than a factual representation of the same topic. Terry Bracco expresses her respect for the political theater, saying that:

There is a boldness, fearlessness, and purposefulness about political theater

that I greatly respect. The political artists I know are keenly aware of their role

in society and are genuinely interested in using art to promote thinking and

stimulate dialogue. Political artists embrace the opportunity to use their voice

to call attention to the social and political problems of our times. They embody

talent, optimism, and a sense of personal responsibility that is admirable.

(Bracco)

It is easy to deduce that the use of ‘boldness’ and ‘fearlessness’ entails the inherent risks to meddling with political affairs in general. Those words are perhaps also used to express rebelliousness against society and its traditions. The power of political theater in conveying and addressing political and social issues is easily perceivable. Some people even think that all theater is political, or that everything in our lives has become so politicized. It is easy to see the mutual influence of politics and theater.

No doubt surrounds the fact that the attention surrounding political theater is not random or insignificant. There are advocates and proponents, as is the case with perhaps any matter in life. On one side of the continuum next to Tara Bracco stands

Michael Billington, theater critic working for the Guardian, writing about his interviews with the renowned political playwright David Hare:

Does political theatre ever have any impact?" That, more or less, was the

question that came from the floor during my session with David Hare during

Albayk Jaam | 22

the Guardian Open Weekend. I replied that it was pointless to expect political

theatre to topple governments or provoke legislation. What it can do, I

suggested, is inform, illuminate, entertain, raise awareness: sometimes, if

we're lucky, all at once. "I'm glad you answered that," said Hare afterwards. "It

comes up at every forum I do. I'm starting to run out of replies. (Billington)

It may seem obvious that there are reports about all matters in life, but

Billington clearly maintains an adamant stance in support of the importance of and need for political drama. He further argues saying it ‘informs, illuminates, entertains,’ which all describe how an effective medium drama is in conveying and shedding light on matters. Regardless of the predominant side, however, it lies without doubt that this genre is becoming more and more entrenched in daily British life. Billington continues to clarify in his article:

[It's] time to point out that political theatre is not synonymous with boredom,

but covers a huge range of forms and styles: everything from Schiller's Don

Carlos to Yes, Prime Minister, from Shakespeare's Coriolanus to Stoppard's

The Coast of Utopia, from Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in

Buckinghamshire to Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business. I don't go along

with Simon Stephens who, at a recent Oxford panel on the subject, argued that

all drama is political. (Billington)

An objective stance cannot be authentic without taking both sides of the argument into consideration. It is clear that Billington is a supporter of political theater, which seems different when it comes to Simon Stephens, a well-known modern playwright. Stephen’s point of view is that:

Albayk Jaam | 23

[One] is better off reading a newspaper than seeing a documentary-play:

verbatim theatre removes the metaphor and in doing so enables the audience to

become detached from the proceedings happening onstage, because now they

are merely observers and never think to recognise one’s own culpability in the

ongoing action. (Goodway)

From the point of view of Stephen, political drama is too much about speech, comprising too many words for the ear to hear and little drama left for the eye to see.

As such, documentary plays, as Stephen terms such plays, are too much talk, as if one is being hearing a newspaper being read. This counteracts the basic aim of drama in general. Spectators will feel alienated, maybe they will even feel that they are being lectured, and so will soon lose interest. Therefore, they will not sympathize with what is being said, and so the whole point will be lost. After examining the dominant points of view at a glance, it would be logical to focus on listening to what others have to say about the matter, before finally looking at some evidence that this chapter aims to present in favor of the relevance of political drama.

Billington, whom is an avid supporter of political drama, said that “The impact of political theatre can inform, stimulate awareness and rearrange consciousness”

(Goodway). He also alluded to theatrical pieces performed recently, such as

Guantanamo written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, and The Color of Justice, a book written by Samuel Walker and also adapted into a play. The Color of Justice is an interesting example since it reveals the levels of racism spreading among

Metropolitan Police, which is an institution meant to symbolize justice, hence the ironic title. Such institutions are known to be parts of governments –governments that are led by political bodies. This is a direct link between the political bodies and

Albayk Jaam | 24 political issues. His final statement at a symposium held at Oxford University was: “I hunger still for plays that confront the society we live in today” (Goodway). This is coming from an expert in the field, and is a proof of the solid nature of drama in our modern days.

Director Ralph Fiennes also shared his opinion on the topic. He speaks about a recent adaptation of a Shakespearian play which he directed, Coriolanus, which offers different kinds of political relationships. Fiennes proceeded to say, “An effective dramatic work can transform the thoughts and ideals of people. I like being provoked and challenged by a good piece of political theatre” (Goodway). It may be implied that drama is inherently political in the sense that politicians attempt to persuade or dissuade the ones listening to them.

The views of a critic, a professor, and a director have been recorded. The piece is still missing a piece. The next point of view shall be that of an actress, a veteran of the theater, Vanessa Redgrave. She refers to how Shakespeare was both a survivor of the politics of his time and a victim of political agendas throughout history. Having done so, she maintains an objective stance, as she points out the negative aspect of interaction between politics and theater:

Politics cannot liberate us and political theatre prevents us from escaping the

prison of politics. We need the knowledge fostered in universities and the

freedom of the internet to lift us from this current state of imprisonment.

(Goodway)

Drama has the power to wake people up and alert them to new ideas, while also challenging their old beliefs, according to her, “there is no such thing as preaching to

Albayk Jaam | 25 the converted.” It is perhaps now the time to provide a conclusive stand on the relevance of political theater.

One of the important examples that can be cited is Shakespeare, especially since many of his plays were based on the lives of political figures or leaders, taken from the Lives written by Plutarch. For Simon Stephens, the reason Shakespeare’s work still echoes today is because of its way in which it compels the audience to sympathize with the political questions faced by his characters: “Shakespeare proffers the question of what it is to be alive- the greatest political question of all that we must face even now” (Goodway). Billington claimed that it is not easy to keep politics out of the theatre as the two are, closely linked, especially when it comes to the plays of

William Shakespeare.

A recent example emphasizing the importance of political theater is George

Bernard Shaw, who is well known for his political activism and politically charged plays, is praised for the persuasive dialogues of his characters. Shaw’s plays are those of ideas. He engages his audience intellectually and his plays are often marked by monologues and dialogues in which characters engage in intellectual debates they are marked by clever language. In fact, Shaw has an adjective after his name, ‘Shavian’, which describes those who support him or to describe his unique techniques when it comes to theater. Shaw wrote to educate people about social and political issues and to inspire people to do something about injustice and passivity about their circumstances. He took great pleasure in inciting people to think about social and political issues. Shaw believed that drama must deal with politics, philosophy and social problems. He aimed to satirize the audience rather than the invented characters.

In Arms and the Man and The Devil’s Discipline he enjoyed showing just opposite of

Albayk Jaam | 26 what his audience expected. He is not afraid of going into politics under the guise of a

Metaphor like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The working of his philosophical theory can be found in some of his plays such as Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra,

Saint Joan and Major Barbara (Evans, 15).

David Hare who is known for his Shavian tendency recently reproduced Man and Superman. There are many other modern day reproductions of this play, such ones. It is thus clear that intellectual drama, be it about politics or otherwise, can be as successful as other genres. According to Tara Bracco:

Despite the insight political theater offers, there’s a misperception that this

type of theater is inherently bad. As a producer of political poetry shows, I’ve

encountered this notion several times. People ask, “How do you keep the work

from being didactic?” My reply is always the same: “Lead with the story.”

(Bracco)

A story that highlights a common human experience is the most important element when it comes to theater. Bracco adds saying. “A well-structured story, not party line preaching, is the mark of good political theater.” From Stephen’s point of view for a second, and if speech is the flaw of political theater, then why not have almost no speech at all, as is the case with the theater of the absurd. The plays of this type of theater depict man as hopeless or as a puppet controlled by invisible forces that lie beyond him or her. These plays were shaped by the political upheavals, social turmoil as well as the scientific breakthroughs striking the world one after the other around the time these playwrights wrote. Critic Martin Esslin, who coined the term in his essay “Theatre of the Absurd”, writes about the matter in his book, Absurd

Drama:

Albayk Jaam | 27

The Theatre of the Absurd … can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be

the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time. The hallmark of

this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of

former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found

wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish

illusions (Esslin, 7)

Absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett is a prime example of playwright of the theater of the absurd. Many of Beckett’s plays fulfill the dual criteria for being used as evidence. The first of which being their relevance to the political status quo, and the second being their ‘innovative’ use of language, or lack of which. Beckett’s plays deal with the politics of life, with society, class, oppression etc. the interpretations are limitless thanks to the skeleton structure of his plays.

In Waiting for Godot, a play set after WW II, when people are left broken and dizzied following years of living in a terrible war, words sometimes fail to describe the feelings, and this is where theater comes in. In Beckett’s play, the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon are incomplete by themselves. They are broken, shattered, they have nowhere to go, and nothing to do except wait for ‘Godot’, whom they are not even sure they know. The characters appear as homeless, both literally and mentally, a sign of the loss people suffered after WW II. Estragon suffers from his boots throughout the play, and stumbles around, just like WW II survivors.

Furthermore, when Pozzo and Lucky show on stage, they only serve to show the dichotomy of classes in society. Pozzo and Lucky perhaps serve as a representation of how twisted human relationships can become in the world, leading to catastrophes including wars. All of these characters serve to illustrate political and social issues

Albayk Jaam | 28 prevalent during post World War II era. The play has had many interpretations, in particular, one religious interpretation has Vladimir and Estragon awaiting the return of the savior, and political interpretations have included seeing the play as an allegory for Franco-German relations or, using a Marxists interpretation, one can understand

Pozzo as the capitalist and Lucky as the laborer. Perhaps it can be said that this particular play is about nothing in particular. If that is the case, then the next example belonging to the same playwright will help provide a clearer picture.

A play written by Beckett in 1982, Catastrophe, can be easily viewed as an allegory about the power of totalitarianism and the struggle to oppose it. The context for this play is obvious, as it was written for Beckett’s friend who was imprisoned in the Czech Republic. The protagonist of Catastrophe, although being passive for most of the play, represents people ruled by dictators. They manipulate the silenced character by exerting their control. Perhaps the reason behind the length of passivity of the protagonist is to resemble how the masses are passive in general. However, around the end of the play, the protagonist looks up defying the audience who looked down on him throughout the play. In his book, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel

Beckett, critic James Knowlson writes:

The Director’s reifying of the Protagonist can be seen as an attempt to reduce

a living human being to the status of an icon of impotent suffering. But, at the

end of the play, he reasserts his humanity and his individuality in a single,

vestigial, yet compelling movement. (Knowlson, 52)

In answer to a reviewer who claimed that the ending was ambiguous Beckett replied angrily: “There’s no ambiguity there at all. He’s saying … you haven’t

Albayk Jaam | 29 finished me yet” (Knowlson, 55). This serves to illustrate the tenacity of the rising in face of the dehumanizing forces at work in modern day governments.

Arthur Miller, known for his influential plays that sparked much attention and culminated in his imprisonment at some point. The Crucible, in which Miller likened the situation with the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) to the witch-hunt in Salem in 1692, was enacted in 1953. Although it was not much of a success at the time of its release, today The Crucible is Miller's most frequently produced work throughout the world. There are similarities between how HUAC discovered suspected communists during the time and the seventeenth-century witch- hunt that Miller depicts in The Crucible, including the narrow-mindedness and disregard for the individuals, which is meant to symbolize the government efforts to fight social issues. Furthermore, suspected Communists were encouraged to confess their crimes and to mention the names of their accomplices, as was the case with the alleged witches of Salem. However, Miller’s concern in The Crucible is not with whether the accused actually are witches, but rather with the unwillingness of the officials to act objectively.

Miller was later found guilty, fined and sentenced to jail by the HUAC, who also asked him to mention names, which he refused. This is an example of how theater can be influential on all levels, from the individual level to the level of governmental bodies. The case and plays of Arthur Miller and others serve as reminders of the importance of political drama. These modern dramas function in showing how far politics and drama are intertwined.

Albayk Jaam | 30

Chapter 2:

The Theatrical Response to the Trauma of Wars and

Witnesses as Portrayed in Karen Malpede’s Prophecy, Simon

Stephens’ A Canopy of Stars, and Lydia Stryk’s American Tet

The plays, American Tet by Lydia Stryk, Prophecy by Karen Malpede, and A

Canopy of Stars by Simon Stephens, may be classified as memory plays or witness plays. Memory Plays are plays in which characters recount the events of the play from their memory, and the term has been used to describe plays written by Ibsen,

Tennessee Williams, and Pirandello (Favorini, 30). Witness plays are similar to memory plays as a form but are more testimonial and documentary in nature, being performed by people sharing their personal and collective stories of suffering. The term was originally developed by Artistic Director Teya Sepinuck who established theater of witness. Through comparing the prevailing themes in these three plays, the underlying relations can be examined, exposing the common grounds between them, which include but are not limited to the morality and grim nature of war, the hypocrisy of politics, and the effect on the minds of the characters involved in such plays.

The argument in favor of the unique relation between war, theater, and politics can be more impelling if viewed from an objective lens in order to avoid bias and prejudice. This is why examining the earlies of histories will reveal an objective clarification of this argument. From ancient times, starting with Homer's epic Iliad, war has been a prominent subject of literature. When it comes to drama and plays,

Albayk Jaam | 31 there is a particularly interesting role in this respect as the genre faces the problem of how to represent violence and warfare. It can stage such actions through enactment or through mere narration and euphemism. In fact, throughout the centuries the immediate presentation of violence was seen as a threat as it introduces violence to the community itself. This is one of the reasons explaining why the strategies developed by ancient Greek drama to alleviate such risks remain to be used in our day. The use of techniques such as the messenger report and others remained stable until well into the 20th century, despite a great number of technological, political, and social developments.

In the fifth century B.C., the most important products were Athenian democracy, Greek tragedy, and the conscription of Athenian citizens, and they are all closely interwoven. If Athens were to succeed in increasing domination over the surrounding area, it would require more soldiers. Therefore, conscripts were granted democratic rights. That was the only way young men would be stirred to leave their homes to fight. To celebrate the glories of the Athenian state, a dramatic festival was frequently held (Shay, 25). The playwrights of those ancient Athenian dramas were combat veterans. Aeschylus and Sophocles were generals, while Euripides was also involved in combat. The predominant theme of their plays is about the effects of war on its victims and victimizers.

Greek drama proves that a decisive battlefield victory will also have an adverse effect on the psyches of the protagonists. In fact, the act of war itself, and not its conclusion, is the catalytic agent altering and corrupting the characters and their social interactions. Another example can be found in the plays about the Trojan War, the defining element of the Greek drama. All of the Trojan War plays share a common

Albayk Jaam | 32 purpose, which is the elaboration of this theme. Agamemnon, the main person responsible for the victory at Troy, is slain by his wife upon his return home. This is in retaliation for the previous crime of offering his daughter as a sacrifice so the

Greek ships might sail for battle. However, that would be just another episode in the chain of murders to ensue.

Later generations carried the torch of bloodshed. Electra, Orestes, and

Cassandra become crazed with rage and suffering brought on by the wars of their fathers. Greek women, although not active participants in war or being combat veterans, suffer equally from the corruption of war. War steals their children, and turns women into objects to be bought and sold. The Greek Queen Clytemnestra and the Trojan Queen Hecuba turn in murderous avengers, despite not actively participating in war. The warrior democracy of Athens needed an outlet, and it came in the form of a great theater Festival to Dionysus. It was perhaps meant to help people recuperate if not actually restore the multiple losses and sacrifices of the people. "Now in place of young men / urns and ashes are carried home / to the houses of the fighters / ... Urns with ashes that once were men," Aeschylus writes in the most bitter of his great Oresteia choruses. "... and the slow anger creeps below their grief”

(Aeschylus, Agammenon 434).

Modern theater is far removed from Greek tragedy in form and content, since theater nowadays is meant for entertainment. It is not funded by the state, but dominated by commercial concerns. Most audiences are looking for an escape. In addition, unlike the Greeks, modern technology has provided social media and live streaming offering real time records of real events as well as the Internet that is available for sharing information. Why should contemporary playwrights turn their

Albayk Jaam | 33 attention toward contemporary wars? Why should audiences care if they do? The answers to these questions are simple and as old as the Greek theater itself. War is such a traumatic experience and its commemoration serves a timeless purpose. Stories are after all meant to share experiences and educate the generations to come. The best way would be to show them with their own eyes. The same fact applies to the world today.

For Greek playwrights the very notion of the individual is shaped by battles.

Greek plays were built on what they learned after the trauma had become effective.

They looked at themselves amazed at the fact that they survived, and felt a need to communicate their experiences with those who did not witness their traumas. In

Greek drama, the hero literally steps out from the chorus to take action, often violent, but also becoming a self-reflective person, capable of suffering and understanding.

This represents a shift from collective thought to an individual from the heart of society. Such a play being presented by a firsthand witness relating the account of they had seen fits into the category of what is called the theater of witness in the modern theater.

The plays mainly deal with soldiers returning from the battlefield only to face an internal crisis. This internal crisis becomes a persistent theme in many modern

British and American war plays. Such crisis is not simply a struggle they fight through. For those who survive the abyss of suffering and reach the shores of self- awareness, the struggle often turns into a crisis of identity and existence. War exposes the lies people trick themselves into believing about themselves. War reveals the hypocrisy of political institutions and their propaganda. These are some of the things that modern plays strive so persistently to portray. The plays representing those

Albayk Jaam | 34 returning from war show how they learn something that lies beyond the understanding of those who have stayed home.

All claims of virtuousness heralded by nations going into war are not as true as one might wish to believe. In war, victory is not assured and the fight that takes place is neither glorious nor noble. Within each of us lies the capacity for evil that is commonly ascribed to the targets of war propaganda. It is here that the role of drama might come into focus. Not in the form of counter propaganda, but rather as a kind of a means of disillusionment for the audience. People like to stay in the comfort of our homes looking at pictures within screens or listening to voices coming out from radios thinking they are aware of what is really happening. People forget that what they digest through those very screens and speakers may not be a representation of the truth. Perhaps they do realize this, but choose to silence those doubts lying deep within, because the reality is too much, or because it would entail that they need do something that lies outside their comfort zones.

Theater of witness serves the function of portraying those who return to speak about the truth of war, such as the veterans coming back from Iraq, Afghanistan or any war that have had much recognition by the modern dramatists. There are many productions, well known or not, that tackle such themes. Such veterans are depicted as our contemporary oracles, but like all oracles, they are condemned and their messages are ignored. These oracles struggle in a brainwashed culture trying to spread what very few people have the power or will to comprehend. War drama strives to disillusion others about the fact that what is being taught in schools, spread by the press, or through the entertainment industry, is all empty and false Dramatists have sought to give these neglected oracles an outlet to voice their message. In exploring

Albayk Jaam | 35 the psychological and physical pains of war, these plays reach unmarked territory most previous theater productions did not dare address. The characters in these plays show the truth and are often depicted as struggling with an afflicted but realistic conscience.

Funding, support, and appreciation reward those who do not challenge what is fed to them, and those who choose to glorify imperialism, permanent war economy, and capitalism. This is something that has been present in Britain since the times when the Lord Chamberlain Office was the official censor for virtually all the theater performed, keeping in mind that it was not until fairly recently that the theater censorship was abolished with the 1968 Theaters Act. This kind of insidious censorship used to make the most recent of productions become tailored to the tastes of those in charge. Those people know the truth behind the words of these oracles, and know the pain they cause. People within their comfort zones prefer to listen to those speaking from the tailored scripts. They prefer to hear about virtue and not the grim reality.

Theater of witness attempts to reach the audience by representing veterans speaking of terrible physical wounds, the invisible psychological maladies, of lies told to force them to kill, of evil committed in the name of virtue. People who have not been to war would simply dismiss the veterans and do not consider them to be the people they know or the people born and raised in their very country. In reality, those people are afraid to admit that if it is easy to murder, and find it more comfortable not to listen. They do not wish to listen to the angry words of veterans, and hope only they would calm down, come back to their senses, and seek help. They say these oracles coming back from war are lunatics. The plays show how they often become

Albayk Jaam | 36 exiles in an urban desert, leaving many of them exiled and battered. Some of them find their only solace in suicide or addiction.

The protagonists in these modern plays are involved in war and often face the ultimate test of courage, where some can finally define their purpose in life. War might seem noble for outside observers not involved in it. It is viewed as a ticket allowing a person to play a small role in the historical drama of the human race at large. However, when viewed closely, war would reveal the dark abyss and horrors that are obscured for the outside observers. The plays reveal to us the human capacity for evil, as well as how war can inflict pain on those waging it and those affected by it. Theater of witness comes to reveal these woes and to push them out of their comfort zones. In places of conflict, characteristics usually ascribed to humane acts have no room. In the wake of the path war carves, all human beings become pawns on a chessboard designed either to kill or be killed. In the moral void created by war, the hypocrisy of social conventions and morality become clear. War maintains the power to destroy everything, be it real physical constructions or abstract values and principles. When these war plays lift the curtain at the stage, they lift the cover from the eyes of viewers. Unlike the curtains, the lids of the eyes of the audience remains unflinching even after the show is over. This is some of what stirs playwrights in the modern era to take matters into their own hands and in turn leads to the introduction of plays that help people become disillusioned with the false glamour of war.

It may be argued that the playwrights themselves have never been to any war, but this is not always the case. There are plenty of books and stories about people who have been there. Such playwrights often rely on these resources to add an element of realism, while still leaving room for their imagination to make play.

Albayk Jaam | 37

An example of such a source is Reverend William P. Mahedy, a war veteran and a

Catholic chaplain in Vietnam. He speaks about a soldier in his book Out of the

Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets. The soldier says to him, "Hey,

Chaplain. how come it's a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it's okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?" (Mahedy, 159). Mahedy provides a very detailed account about the thoughts of not only himself, but also that of those who depended on his opinions as a religious man:

Consider the question that he and I were forced to confront on that day in a

jungle clearing. How is it that a Christian can, with a clear conscience, spend a

year in a war zone killing people and yet place his soul in jeopardy by

spending a few minutes with a prostitute? If the New Testament prohibitions

of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, why, then, are Jesus'

injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words,

what does the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' really mean? (Mahedy, 160)

Mahedy’s writings are an example of what many playwrights have come to rely upon in modern theater. These sources provide exactly what a playwright would need when aiming to produce theater of witness or documentary drama. What

Mahedy is trying to tell us is that there is a difference between killing someone who is trying to kill you and taking the life of someone who does not have the power to harm you. The former is killing, whereas the latter might be as well considered murder.

However, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it is hard to distinguish between the elusive enemy and innocent civilians, murder occurs far more often than killing. More often than not, civilian families end up being massacred in air strikes and UAV attacks. Civilians are shot in neighborhoods after an IED goes off near a

Albayk Jaam | 38 convoy. Blind artillery shells land anywhere and everywhere. No one stops to look; the dead and injured are left behind. These facts are often distorted when presented through the prejudiced lens of media. In a world where visual media rises to prominence, it is hard to grasp the attention of a population becoming increasingly less reliant on reading.

Theater of witness teaches the audience that everyone has the capacity to commit evil, and that it might be appalling to think of how little it takes to unleash such evil. For veterans of various war, the hardest fact they try to cope with is that the line between the victims and the abusers is paper-thin. There are people who find delight in destruction and death, and the fact that very few can resist such menace, is daunting to say the least. Even those that may refrain from such acts but say nothing become silent accomplices. When they see with their own eyes what they have been silent about, they are finally prompted into action. Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic affairs. War always brings to the surface the worst elements of any society. People looking for violence and those with a lust for absolute power find relish in going through wars. Wars turn the moral order upside down. During the siege of Sarajevo, the criminal class was the first to organize the defense of Sarajevo. When the criminals were not operating roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army, they were looting and killing the Serb residents in the city (Hedges, 109). However, war is not always about those who are evil. There are those who are disillusioned and find themselves stuck in the middle of a big typhoon of lies. Mahedy, again, serves to illustrate the examples of those who are left wondering about what is really happening, as he states in his same book:

Albayk Jaam | 39

In theological terms, war is sin. This has nothing to do with whether a

particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier's war were

right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It

is a form of hatred for one's fellow human beings. It produces alienation from

others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.

(Mahedy, 172)

The young soldiers and Marines do not plan or lead wars. They do not seek to justify or explain the causes of war. They are taught to believe and follow orders.

Trust becomes forever shattered for many soldiers in war. They become disillusioned with the political propaganda back home. They realize that war is not virtuous or noble, monstrous and frightening. Since audiences are left unaware of the very fact that war is a grim affair, it is hard to imagine they would be able to recognize the agony of such veterans coming back home. This only serves to deepen their scars and leave on their own.

War is always about betrayal, be it the betrayal of the young by the old, of the believers by the idealists, and of soldiers by politicians. Society's institutions mold us into compliant citizens, but their real goals are discovered through war. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to trusting again. Ask a veteran going through the struggle of putting back his or her life together, and their answer will reveal the corruption and staggering hypocrisy inherent in the wars they witnessed.

Those refusing to listen to the suffering and words of such soldiers, brought to life in the plays of modern playwrights, become accomplices in the evil they denounce. With so much hanging in the balance, someone has to stand shoulder to shoulder with these

Albayk Jaam | 40 veterans and help them be heard. Such is the role played by playwrights on the modern theater of the whole world.

The need to portray the reality of war becomes more evident when the fact that modern battlefields and warfare are becoming less and less personal. For example, in

Vietnam, a large part of the American population was involved, even if only through a son, a brother, or a lover. Most of the public today avoid being personally touched by the sacrifices of war where the wounded and the dead are coming home to a small percentage of families. Multiple wars are being fought using the same forces. This leaves the others simply glad to be spared having to go for war in exchange for not questioning whether a democracy can employ a volunteer army. This is a price paid for not questioning outsourcing military duties to mitigate troop shortages. There are many private security companies like Blackwater or Kellogg, Brown and Root, that are funded through military contracts in the USA. Modern wars are being fought by a minority made up largely of the poor, or a mercenary army, far better paid than soldiers are.

All plays in question deal with the psychologies of those returning from war.

They attempt to portray the trauma they suffer, and in extension, help spread knowledge to those around. If the mortal injury survivability rate is much higher nowadays is taken into consideration, it is evident that more soldiers today are surviving catastrophic battle injuries instead of dying on the field. Many more soldiers than ever return home not dead, but bearing serious physical wounds, often with brain injuries because the helmets that are supposed to save their lives shock their brains under the force of nearby explosions. Robert Bazell, chief science and health correspondent says, "More injured troops are surviving the war in Iraq than any other.

Albayk Jaam | 41

But because of the terrible force of IED explosions, more are surviving with brain injury than in any other war" (Bazell). This is arguably caused partly by multiple deployments of a limited fighting force, and partly because of the terrifying nature of an insurgent war, in which there are no front lines, and the "enemy" is never clearly known. The post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD diagnoses being made today document the psychological toll these wars have on veterans is on the rise. The number of suicides taking place is even more indicative of how hard the lash back from war can be. Governments tend to hide statistics, but they still find their way to the public eventually. One report about governmental attempts at hiding reports states that such practice is fairly common as evidenced by Leopold’s article:

Last year, 140 US soldiers committed suicide, a record high, and during the

first four months of 2009, 64 US soldiers have committed suicide. Military

officials said a US soldier is now more likely to commit suicide than a civilian

and the Army has recently commissioned a $50 million study to explain the

suicide epidemic. […] veterans' disability claims are on backlog; it can take

six months for a disability claim to be processed and up to four years before an

appeal is heard in cases where disability has been denied. (Leopold)

The number of suicides occurring among veterans after combat rose at a rate that was alarming even to the military authorities. “Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving cater from the department of veterans’ affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans die of suicide than arc dying in combat overseas” (Kristof). These numbers were widely quoted and come from several places such as CBS and the centers for disease control and prevention. CBS news also reported that the veterans’ administration had hidden

Albayk Jaam | 42 the suicide numbers from public view. Incidents of veterans' violence against others are also on the rise, as well as the horrific murders of wives or lovers, sometimes strangers, and violence among soldiers. All of these facts are what form the basis for the argument in this chapter.

The first example of such a fact was in May 2008, when American GI was charged with gunning down five of his fellow service members in Iraq. During the same month, a former soldier who had been given an honorable discharge from the army was sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering a fourteen-year-old

Iraqi girl and killing her family, an atrocity which became the subject of the play 9

Circles, by Bill Cain discussed in the next chapter (Herbert, “War's Psychic Toll”).

For the majority of veterans who avoid a PTSD diagnosis, and for those who refuse to be diagnosed or treated to bravely manage or readjust themselves to civilian life, the toll exacted by traumatic memory is still great enough to damage the sense of wellbeing. PTSD is defined by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs as:

a psychiatric disorder that can occur following the experiencing or witnessing

of life-threatening events such as military combat, natural disasters, terrorist

incidents, serious accidents, abuse and violent personal assaults like rape.

People who suffer from PTSD often relive the experience through nightmares

and flashbacks, have difficulty sleeping, and feel detached or estranged, and

these symptoms can be severe enough and last long enough to significantly

impair the person's daily life. (What is PTSD)

The military has stated that at least one in five American soldiers who were deployed overseas to Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from some degree of PTSD. There are also the questions that are almost never asked. How many Iraqi and Afghan civilians

Albayk Jaam | 43 and fighters have these wars killed, injured, displaced? How many did it cause to suffer the loss of relatives, stability, and property? At least the names and number of

American and British soldiers dead in the two conflicts fought are known. However, the estimates on the other sides remain not so clear. Not many still remember the number of children among the 147 civilian dead in the May 2009 bombing of the

Afghan village. People are usually oblivious of such answers, let alone the questions themselves. The village was Farah and the 147 fatalities counted by the villagers on the ground, two-thirds of them said to be children and teenagers, are sharply disputed by the U.S. military, which says the death toll from the bombing was far lower, citing thirty civilians, and attributes some of the deaths to grenades thrown by the Taliban.

The villagers have argued that the Taliban had left the region before the bombing began. According to another newspaper, "A military investigation has concluded that

American personnel made significant errors in carrying out some of the air strikes in western Afghanistan on May 4” (Shmitt).

Timothy Williams’ article proves that such questions are rarely asked. "We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks when the Iraq conflict began.

Thus, there is no good idea of how many Iraqis have died because of the invasion and the occupation. The estimates vary wildly between the numbers posted on www.iraqbodycount.org, which listed documented civilian deaths from violence and the other studies which were based on household survey data. It is not even possible to guess how many more will die from continued conflict, cluster or other unexploded bombs, birth defects from exposure to battlefield toxins, wounds, and suicide.

Statistics indicate about four million Iraqis that have been internally or externally displaced. There are less pronounced long-term consequences, as can be seen from various reports about the fact, an example of which is Williams’ report:

Albayk Jaam | 44

Ninety percent of Iraq's 180 hospitals do not have basic medical and surgical

supplies ... Iraqis also have disproportionately high rates of infant mortality,

cerebral palsy and cancer. Exacerbating the problem, Iraqi and American

officials [say], is that hundreds of thousands of Iraq's professional class have

fled or been killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few

doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and the like. (Williams)

The effects of all this loss on civil society are staggering. Theater focusing on war can help shed light on such facts that can be easily overlooked, forgotten or even hidden.

The effects can be greater when the emphasis on realistic facts and statistics is what forms the backbone of most of these plays. Since it is clear that there is no real knowledge about the affairs of war despite the vast availability of means to spread such knowledge, it becomes evident that the playwrights have taken matters into their own hands. State sponsored violence impacts on society are wide enough to cause major concerns. America’s wars abroad seem to exist separately from the domestic economic crises. However, wars influence the actions and overall state of the entire country waging it in ways that may not be fully comprehended. The government curtails all manners of services to citizens rather than reduce the military budget which totals 50 percent of what the entire rest of the world spends on military matters.

Theater steps in to provide a contemplative space, where it updates the audience about the reality of the times. Between the moral dilemma and the individual capacity to sympathize, the theater of war and witness enters, providing useful and meaningful ways to create a gathering space in which one would begin to consider, along with the others around, the sorts of societal choices, their reasons and

Albayk Jaam | 45 consequences. Such matters would fall upon deaf ears in isolation. The multi-faceted tragic nature of war for those suffering it alone will cause them to become numb.

The enlightening stories are those of the tales of real characters, not abstracts or apathetic documentary parables, who lived through a series of events in which they were forced to act, but also committed what they could not live through. Such characters are caught even in the worst situation, but still must make a choice. This is a dramatic action that reveals the movement of the human spirit as it shows how a self-conscious individual is shaped by history, as well as the moral choices made by that person. Dramatic action traces the best of choices, and the worst. This is why it lies among the best medium for conveying the atrocities of war to spectators grouped together in the theater. Writing about her experiences as a student protesting against

Vietnam war, American playwright Karen Malpede says:

Nearly fifty-nine thousand Americans were killed between 1963 and 1976,

and nearly three million Vietnamese […] The young soldiers looked more

frightened than we did as we impulsively broke through their ranks to reach

the steps of the huge building, in the same phalanx, by chance, as Norman

Mailer, who would memorialize the march in a famous book, The Armies of

the Night. […] In 1973, I did my first oral history interview […] Several

things, he said, had happened: the military, concerned about flagging morale

among the fighter bomber pilots as the war dragged on, had actually played

them tapes of the screams of the victims on the ground. (Malpede, Messina,

and Shuman XVIII)

Albayk Jaam | 46

Comparing her attitude with a more recent experience in September 11, some useful insight into how a place suffering from bombing and terror would look like can be read:

….[The firefighter] survived the collapse of both towers; bodies and debris fell

all around him. In the following days, he returned to work on the pile. Detritus

still sticks in his lungs. He has retired on disability from the fire department

and has traveled several times to India. Did he want to bomb Afghanistan, to

invade Iraq? I sat with him while he trembled as a passenger plane flew

overhead. "No," emphatically not. […] Eighty-five percent of interviewees in

the Columbia study were opposed to the bombing of Afghanistan and the

invasion of Iraq. (Malpede, Messina, and Shuman XIX)

Fear has been used since September 11, 2001, to fuel the wars fought worldwide. Fear of terrorist threats and rage at crimes committed. Perhaps one of the best ways to deal with rage and fear is through the tragic theater which is useful here since it forces us to be in the presence of the huge emotions and offers solitude to a large mass. The Greek dramatists knew their audience had great patience for being able to watch, listen, and contemplate under the hot sun, on those stone benches, in view of the sea, where combat veterans could sit silently and attentively.

These plays are written in the midst of unfolding events while opening the eyes of those who may be oblivious to the truth. Each play diverges in style, with each making an attempt at shaping untold and unimaginable experiences, as well as their effects on the body, psyche, and society of prolonged, and extreme violence. Each of these plays strives to employ new dramatic strategies out of the necessity to engage the audience and reveal the truth. Some plays contain surprising bursts of humor,

Albayk Jaam | 47 while others maintain an ironic perspective. The language and structures of each play are unique, and their arguments far provocative. Such plays do not seek the glorification of violence nor surrendering to it inevitability. Instead, each play attempts projecting new dramatic actions, which bring to the surface new moral choices about how people are shaped. They offer a passionate exploration of unexplored contemporary moral problems. What are the costs of war to the individual and state? Are bombing, invasion, occupation, detention, and torture the best ways to defeat extremism? Or are they dangerous because of the extreme reactions they evoke? Given these questions and the facts before them, there is now wonder that a unique stage for the presentation of war would emerge.

The theater of witness can be defined as a type of testimonial and documentary plays performed by people sharing their personal and collective stories of suffering and transformation. It is used to communicate the experiences suffered in war, and places audiences in conjunction with the grim reality of war so they can really “witness” the events. Other types of drama maintain realism at the cost distancing themselves a bit, as is the case in Documentary Drama. These “treatments” are less “invasive” while addressing and following a unique pattern. Regardless of the case, it is the plays of memory and witness that address individualism and ask whether a person might be motivated or able to make a choice that at the same time, helps redefine the nature of social interaction. The theater of witness sometimes might help us not predict our mistakes, but at least have a moment of thought before rushing to action that may be regretted later.

Driven by this determination to examine and reveal the human stories inside the wars fought, the following contemporary dramatists have revived the theater's

Albayk Jaam | 48 ancient uses, including the theater's socially corrective power. A selection of such types of plays is briefly introduced along with the themes, discussing the details of those most relevant to fit within the scope of this chapter.

American Tet is a play by Lydia Stryk, an American playwright who first trained as an actress, has an MA in journalism and a PhD in Theatre from the City

University of New York. She was inspired by the feminist idea circulating at the time that women might have other stories to tell and other ways of telling them. She is the author of over a dozen full-length plays and a few short ones, including Monte Carlo,

The House of Lily, The Glamour House, American Tet, An Accident and Lady Lay.

Lydia Stryk describes her particular experience with war in an interesting account:

For me, the Iraq war has been the seminal experience of my political

awakening—and more specifically, the events leading up to the war. When

literally millions took to the streets on February 15, 2003, across the world to

say NO, DON'T DO THIS. Since 9-11 and then leading up to and during the

war/s, I had listened to a number of vets—of the Vietnam, Korean, Gulf and

Iraq wars speak at various gatherings and also—and perhaps most

importantly—many military family members. Listening to them, I began to

understand what it meant to be raised with a set of values—and I mean real

values—that enabled them to take part in what I had grown up believing was a

preposterous and immoral way of life. These military folk were thinking this

through on their own terms and voicing deep concerns and amazing resistance

from within. For some reason, it came to me that the only way I could write

about this war was by entering their world. (Malpede, Messina, and Shuman

XXI)

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American Tet is a play that deals with the traumatic effects of war and how such effects influence people. It is a striking account of the effect of the Iraq war and past wars on soldiers and military families. The play enters into the lives and world of a military family, the Krombachers. The father, Jim, served in Vietnam before building a career in the Army; while the son, Danny, currently serves as a military policeman in Iraq. There is Elaine, the wife and mother who serves as an example for other women whose families are involved in war. The family, including the rebellious daughter, Amy, await Danny who is coming home on leave. Danny’s return brings unexpected complications into the black and white world of duty and pride.

The play consists of two acts, with eight characters. It is a full-length drama of about 90 minutes. The setting for the first act is a backyard and garden of the

Krombacher family. It is spring 2004, the first anniversary of the war in Iraq, and the family is following the news of other soldiers and their families on base, including

Danny's close friend Angela who is now lying in a hospital in Germany. Their daughter, Amy, awaits her brother's arrival with a purpose of her own. Meanwhile in a

Chinese restaurant, Elaine encounters a Vietnamese woman, Nhu, who shakes her faith in everything she has ever believed. In the second act, the image of the disfigured American soldier of the Iraq war Angela Gomez haunts the plays, whose painful shrieks and labored breathing will surely leave audiences struggling with the same moral dilemmas experienced by the characters. The characters are portrayed as changing dynamically over the course of the play. For instance, Elaine learns a valuable lesson from Nhu through their conversations. Later when the family is on the table, the whole family ironically repeats “Tet” as taught by Nhu about the importance of the word:

Albayk Jaam | 50

NHU. And so, I thought, today is first day of spring here. In America. So I

prepare a few little specialties … these special dishes, yeah. For Tet.

ALL. (repeating again) Tet.

NHU. Just a few special dishes. Yeah. For Tet. (Stryk 78; Act 2, Scene 1)

Later on, Jim starts seeing a little girl named Dao whom he assumes came with Nhu.

He proceeds to calm the girl by finding out whether she is lost:

JIM. Hey, hey, don’t cry. She’s here. I’ll fetch her. What’s your name?

(Pointing at himself) Jim. (Pointing at her) and you?

LITTLE GIRL: D’ao.

JIM. Da’o. Now that is a very pretty name. Da’o, you come with me, okay?

We’ll go find Nhu. (Stryk 80; Act 2, Scene 1)

The title of the play, American Tet, refers back to Vietnam and the Tet Offensive of 1968, a surprise assault launched by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong against

American and South Vietnam government troops, which proved the war was far from over (Malpede, Messina, and Shuman XXVII). Entering the world of military families in American Tet, the playwright writes to expose the contradiction inherent in the military mythos, those of the idealized heroism of the soldier and the grim reality of war. In this play, there is a large space between the feelings of the characters and their actions, which remain largely driven by military ideology.

On the modern stage, theatrical dramas have evolved to contain various elements permitting further classification. However, for the sake of mild diversity, the chapter will briefly tackle, as stated before, three plays related to war, leaving the deeper analysis of reality-based theater for the next chapter. Stryk's play, American Tet,

Albayk Jaam | 51 includes the story of a female soldier who was seriously wounded in combat.

Although technically women in military service usually serve supporting roles, in wars without front lines, women often find themselves in battle. The characters in plays written by female playwrights speak of female concerns, those of despair at a disfigured face, maternal love, abortion, infertility, and other themes.

What is of more significance in such plays by women is the female playwrights' insistence on showing the other on the stage. The characters of those people who suffered from war firsthand, be it victims or perpetrators, appear, speak, feel, and act.

When most writers and media outlets choose to demonize those people where terrorism they claim comes from, it is a welcome surprise to find humanity arising from the ability of the playwrights of these plays to empathize. Empathy means imagining what it means to be another person, to feel their suffering and agony. At the very least, empathy means the ability to recognize the other is a living thinking human capable of feeling and suffering.

By the end of the play, Elaine learns a valuable lesson from Nhu. She becomes influenced and turns into a believer in the stories told by Nhu. Her last words before the curtain closes are a proof of her change:

ELAINE: Let’s just sit. Let’s just sit here. Let’s not go. Anywhere. Let’s not

get up. Ever. Let’s just sit here, together. Nhu said, life is suffering. On

the hand, there will be another spring. Let’s sit. And maybe. Eventually.

The pain … will go away. We’ll figure it out. We’ll know what to do.

(Stryk 94; Act 2, Scene 9)

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Such a change is what memory plays and witness plays try to bring about with all possible means. The plays themselves are structured so as to be the vessels conveying dramatic action on stage in ways never seen before. Memory can be described as unreliable because of being fuzzy and erratic, but it remains a strong faculty that dictates many actions in our daily lives. The next play is about memory as well, but in more subtle ways. It is a depiction of the trauma caused by the indirect results of memory.

A Canopy of Stars, written by English playwright Simon Stephens who was born in 1971. He graduated from the University of York with a degree in History. He worked as a teacher for a few years, before quitting to become a professional playwright. His works include Bluebird, Herons, One Minute, On the Shore of the

Wide World, and Motortown. He won several awards and is currently the Artistic

Associate at the Lyric.

The play at hand consists of three scenes with seven characters. The setting of the first scene is set in underground bunker, the second scene is on the battlefield of

Mazdurak, and the third scene is set back home in south Manchester. Sergeant Jay

Watkins, a man in his thirties, and Private Richard Kendall are in the bunker. Richard, a man in his twenties is on watch. They proceed to discuss their current situation exchanging their opinions on different topics. In the second act, the stage turns into a brief battlefield that ends with one of the soldiers being mortally wounded. In the third act, the stage turns to Watkin’s house. Jay is found seated in front of the TV watching “Belgian football”. He is unable to sleep and argues with his wife Cheryl about the fact of not being able to spend time with his son or even look at him. The argument goes on to express Cheryl’s frustration over his actions home and abroad.

Albayk Jaam | 53

She asks to have the real Jay back while he tells her one of the stories he witnessed in

Afghanistan, but to no avail. His story falls on deaf ears, and the play ends with a still scene.

This play is similar in some aspects to 9 Circles by American playwright Bill

Cain, which will be discussed in the third chapter. However, they are different plays, from two different countries, about two different wars, yet there are many similarities between them. The war on Iraq "A war of choice" and the war on Afghanistan "A war of necessity". Each play is written, more or less, while being oriented towards the themes of each country. The plots are different, the characters are unique, and the themes resonate in different ways. There is, however, a common ground that both plays share. It is theme of the moral destructiveness of war plaguing those who fight.

The Greek playwright Aeschylus cared more about being a military man than his being a playwright, and chose to immortalize himself by writing on his tombstone not that he was the author of The Oresteia, and the inventor of Greek Tragedy, but that he "fought at the Battle of Marathon" (Battle of Marathon). At the legendary battle in which the tiny Greek fighting force turned back the Persian Empire and so cleared the path for Greek democracy, what Aeschylus saw was that men suffered from hubris. In the face of battle, pride took hold of ordinary youth who began to feel invincible. They did things that set them apart from the crowd and made them the sorts of heroes the tragic playwrights would immortalize.

Perhaps this old fact can be further explained in a modern fashion. In his famous book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, psychiatrist and classicist Jonathan Shay writes about the changes wrought by battle on the soldier's psyche. In its extreme state, the soldier in the grip of hubris on the

Albayk Jaam | 54 battlefield literally goes berserk, a “Norse word for the frenzied warriors who went into battle naked, or at least without armor, in a godlike or god-possessed—but also beast-like—fury.” Shay lets a Vietnam veteran explain: "I lost all my mercy . . I just couldn't get enough ... I really loved …. killing” Shay writes, “I conclude that the berserk state is ruinous, leading to the soldier's life-long psychological and physiological injury if he survives. I believe that once a person has entered the berserk state, he or she is changed forever” (Shay, 77).

In A Canopy of Stars, the protagonist Jay Watkins does not commit the crimes he contemplates on the stage itself, but he is about to enter into a state of berserking at any moment. The tension building up in his charged mind embodies the tension in accumulating throughout the play. He tells a fellow soldier “I’m here cause I want to take the face of every single last Taliban and grind it into the rock of the desert”

(Stephens 356; Act 1, Scene 1). The character returns home in the final act only a shell, unable to properly interact with his family and unable to rest. The damage is not limited to the soldiers on the battlefield, as it further extends to reach those they deal with back home. The shock of Simon Stephens's play lies in the loss of the ability to feel for others, not in the soldier who fights to protect "good" Afghans, but in his wife who says, "People shouldn't survive in places like that. You should let them burn.

They deserve it” (Stephens 365; Act 3, Scene 1).

None of the playwrights facing the realities of current wars wish to let violence overwhelm all else, especially so since the violence these plays document is real and is happening to real people. Perhaps enacted brutality can be found more in plays about love relationships or social maladies. Even Stephen’s brutal re-creation of battle focuses on battle losses, not on violence done. Bill Cain avoids staging the rape.

Albayk Jaam | 55

Though deaths in battle determine the action of American Tet, and Prophecy, no battle deaths are shown. Instead of violent reenactments, a descriptive language contains the horrors that conveys and transforms them so as not to be shocking and allow each member of the audience or readers to be free to feel whatever they can.

Greek tragedians set the restriction against violence on the stage

(Sommerstein, 31). Messengers communicate the most extreme types of action to the audience. The shock of hearing such news affects the audience more strongly than any violence enacted on stage. It is possible that the formal messenger speeches from classic tragedy are replaced in contemporary plays of war and witness by the memory speech. These plays use memory in transformative ways. Normal memory is what traumatic events disrupt. Disrupted memory is the place those traumas remain lodge.

Violent trauma scars the characters forever. Extreme violence controls the characters through the constant interior replay of terrifying sights and sounds, flashbacks, nightmares, and compulsive behavior, silence or deadening repetitive talk.

Remembering traumas might be the only way to repair the self, at least to some degree, and is the best medicine available to such a malady. Memory in contemporary drama becomes the battleground on which characters fight for restoration of the fragments of themselves.

As memory asserts itself, time becomes complex. Present is disrupted by frequent revisits to the past. The combination of what once was with what is allows the future, the reason for, to be revealed. Characters sometimes cannot remember because there is no empathic listener. Sometimes there is something keeping them back, such as military honor. These characters, unable to express their distress due to

Albayk Jaam | 56 circumstances, struggle with coming to terms with their losses. They stay stuck in a whirlwind of pain, unable to escape.

In the third play, Prophecy written by Karen Malpede, characters converge in unusual or surrealistic ways, with actions bearing a dual nature, one disastrous, one corrective. Those actions proceed in parallel and mixing plot lines. The need to listen play a crucial role in this play. An absent Jewish father hears the story of his daughter, now a Muslim, and in a different scene the wife asks advice about the battle wounded, each becomes able to hear the other's truths and in turn understand what is hidden.

The fate of playwrights is usually to connect unconnected themes, generations, and wars. However, the tensions between young and old; the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and

Lebanon; the stories inherited, the inherent conflict, and our interpretations are all interwoven in intricate ways.

Karen Malpede was born in 1945 in Texas, America. She obtained Master of

Fine Arts degree in theater at the Columbia University School of the Arts is the author of fifteen plays, short fiction, and essays on theater and human rights. Her plays include Another Life, Sappho and Aphrodite, Us, The Beekeeper’s Daughter and I

Will Bear Witness.

Prophecy consists of two acts, with eleven and eight scenes respectively. The cast involves eight characters representing different backgrounds. It is through them that Malpede deals with three international conflicts while revolving around Sarah

Golden and Alan Golden. The play takes place in the early fall of 2007 in New York

City, and later in the memories of Sarah and Alan Golden in the sixties and eighties.

The style of the set is a combination between modern realism and more classical scenes. In the play, Sarah, a teacher of Greek tragedy, is captivated by one of her

Albayk Jaam | 57 students, Jeremy Thrasher. He reminds her of a former lover killed in Vietnam.

Jeremy causes a scene at school, and the audience later learns that he is an Iraq war veteran who is haunted by the memory of a woman he killed. There is a third conflict that deals with the Israeli invasion. Alan has a daughter from Hala called Mariam, and when he meets his daughter, she threatens to blow up her father. This is followed by a dialogue that illustrates the struggle of the various sides involved. The father tries to ask for forgiveness, no avail and Jeremy shows his reluctance:

JEREMY. They tell us everyone is armed and dangerous. They tell us all the

women have bombs under those robes; they just look pregnant. That

they’ll blow themselves up just to kill us. They tell us not to trust

MARIAM. I can’t listen to this.

JEREMY. Please, I’m so sorry, really I am. I’m so sorry […]

MARIAM. Stop. You come on to me because I wear a headscarf. You know

nothing of my life.

JEREMY. I’m sorry. I’m telling you that. You can’t go. Not like this.

MARIAM. I won’t listen. I don’t want to know. Go to your priest if you need

forgiveness. Go ask your government for help. Why is it an Arab who

must forgive? (Malpede 246; Act 2, Scene 18)

Prophecy makes memory and witness speeches the pivot of its focus

(Malpede, Messina, and Shuman XXV). This is also the case for 9 Circles, which will again be discussed in detail in the next chapter. The results of such difficult memory depends on several factors, which are the severity of the event or events, the inner resilience of those who have the memories, the empathic qualities of the listener, and luck. Bad luck can bring one down. Cain's soldier, condemned to death, never had a

Albayk Jaam | 58 chance. Bad luck was all he ever knew, but in a final scene after his death, he remembers and even hears the words of his victim as she begged for life.

Jeremy, the Iraq veteran in Prophecy, kills himself but he is partly redeemed by his need to remember the night he killed a pregnant woman and wept with her husband over the corpse. Jeremy's death is determined not by any flaw in Sarah's listening but by his own belief that the severity of what he had done has forever violated his awareness of how a good life must be lived. In this sense, Sarah's passionate teaching of Greek drama both awakens Jeremy and dooms him. There have been one thousand suicides among Iraq combat veterans and four thousand combat deaths. "Something is wrong," says military psychiatrist and retired Brigadier General

Steven Xenakis, adding that the memories leading "someone capable of feeling guilt toward suicide have more to do with what that soldier may have done in war than with what was seen (Xenakis). While the U.S. combat role in Iraq may be finished, fatalities due to combat are far from over.

Like the Greek messenger speech, contemporary memory speeches and scenes both distance and allow for deeper entry at the same time. Recalling the crucial memory, characters relive their past in the present while the audience observes both the speaker and memory that is brought to life. Often a crucial memory is triggered inside the listener and is shared. The audiences witnessing this also gain the key to access their own memories. Moral philosopher Judith Butler in her book Frames of

War asks which lives are "grievable" and why? She points out that war limits empathy by declaring the enemy off-limits or out-of-frame. (Butler, 5)

Invoking the other and encouraging empathy for those who are not similar is a function of a theater of witness whose ultimate goal is to reimagine certain patterns of

Albayk Jaam | 59 thought. Violent conflict to defeat an enemy, who otherwise is bent on your destruction, might not be the most effective, or the most creative response to the inevitable conflicts which arise among human beings. Inside the family it is generally agreed, though hardly universally lived, that violence is an inadequate response to conflict. If the concept of family was expanded from those who are biologically related so as to include fellow human beings, it would be possible to arrive at an understanding of relatedness that is global. Theater of witness maintains an understanding that here transcends its own focus on the causes and resistance to violence, and becomes a means for empathy.

In these plays, the other comes onto the stage as a person and a unique individual able to influence his or her destiny as well as that of others. The other becomes in this way one like us, needful of our empathy. The playwrights of these plays are also engaged in mining empathy and exploiting its limits.

What is meant by having the dead be in the present be it in Stryk's play, with the appearance of the dead Vietnamese child Dao to former soldier Jim Krombacher or the other plays, is remembering the dead. This means receiving the dead and allowing them to be present in the minds of the living, which lets characters recognize the moral worth of their lives. In Prophecy, Sarah's memories of her lover who died in

Vietnam become increasingly vivid until, at the moment her Iraq-war veteran student,

Jeremy, kills himself offstage, the young Lukas appears to her. David Hare's The

Vertical Hour is realistic and linear compared to Prophecy. In Hare’s play, Oliver

Lucas finds an intimate relationship with death. He was once a surgeon, intervening in the most medically spectacular ways. However, after killing two people in a road accident, his new mission becomes to sit with the dying and be a comforting witness

Albayk Jaam | 60 at life's end. The antihero has renounced heroics, and that is where the greatness of his act comes from.

When the dead are not dignified by memory, the living lose their ability to feel anything but rage. If violence is glorified onstage as is so often the case when witnessing is not the point, no care is paid to those who are killed. Bodies litter the ground like things. However, in the plays of war and witness, the dead never cease to matter to the living who, to varying degrees, may be culpable in their deaths. Memory of the dead keeps conscience alive. Only the stories survive death.

If individual characters cannot always outlast the claims of traumatic memory, the audience can and does. The audience is made stronger, wiser, and capable of identifying with the sufferer. Thus, the plays of war and witness awakens audiences, purifies them, and provides them with clearer sight. This is how catharsis is attained.

The original function of the Memory Plays and the Theater of Witness, similar to that of classical tragedy, is to allow the audience to dwell on the matters laid bare in front of them and to become able to comprehend more of life's harshness and wonders than before. Catharsis or clarity of sight, does not mean knowing one thing only, it leaves the audience alert outside and inside. The drive to remember and represent the other returns us to the origins of the drama, origins evoked again by the theater of witness.

In Greek tragedy, the chorus performed the ritual function by allowing the audience to witness and share a common sentiment. Theater of witness has a special role in the psychologies of the audience, as Malpede says:

Theater of witness as an extension of psychological realism, epic, and

modernist theater techniques seldom includes a chorus…. The ritual underlay

shows through, with intention and intensity, in the witnessing drama’s

Albayk Jaam | 61

propensity to involve the audience by evoking of the other and of the dead in

order to provoke a combination of perceptions which might not yet be

commonly assumed: That war is other than heroic adventurism and

participation in armed conflict, whether as a soldier or as a noncombatant

citizen even in a nation at war overseas, produces lasting, often deleterious,

effects on human character; that an increase in empathic understanding of the

other might serve to strengthen democracies and defeat the terrorism meme.

(Malpede, Messina, and Shuman XXIX)

Without the exploration of contemporary history's impact on the psyche, characters are unredeemed, and society follows the endless repetition of the same violent sacrifice of the young that is called war. The theater of witness must not be underestimated. Audiences that are deeply moved, whose perceptions have been altered, who recognize the other in themselves and remember the dead, are the ones that have went through a change. They feel more alive, connected and present in the world. These plays of war and witness remain somehow open-ended. Each hints that there is more to come. Each play has moments when language and dramatic action transform what is in the present to remind us that there is a process of creativity.

The themes, techniques, and aims of these three plays, expose underlying structure. Modern playwrights take matters into their own hands, making theater a stage where they aim to increase the awareness of the audience about political decisions, about war, and about their roles in the bigger picture. The techniques range from documentary, to more fictional tales, with varying degrees of success. It is worth mentioning that these dramas at times use techniques taken from the field of politics, perhaps as a means of fighting fire by fire to expose the hypocrisy, or a means of

Albayk Jaam | 62 correctly using legitimate mechanisms of spreading knowledge. When it comes to themes, there are many common ones, those of a false political propaganda; the corrupting effects of war, the scars the soldiers bear back home, empathy with the other, and memory. Modern political representations in theatre, including the theater of war and witness, have come a far way, and are worthy of being independently categorized, studied, and watched.

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Chapter 3

Analysis of Reality-Based Political Drama: Guantanamo and 9

Circles

Reality-based of theater is related to politics in a unique way, since most of its material comes from formal sources dealing with politics or material that springs from the interview accounts with people who were firsthand witnesses, such as soldiers coming back from war and those affected by political actions. Verbatim theater is a form of documented theatre in which plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic (Hammond and

Steward, 11). The second play is 9 Circles, which is a docudrama that employs materials taken from reports and newspapers, but has a looser insistence on reality, since the events are not reported “verbatim” and the playwright’s imagination plays a more active role. The comparison will examine the roles of playwrights and actors, stagecraft techniques used, and other matters.

Political drama is a necessary form of theater as established in the previous chapters, and this has been the case since ages. However, it has its problems, such as occupying a shifting middle ground between a melodrama and a lecture hall. Plays have to portray the dynamic subjects of violence and torture on the one hand, while delivering sedentary speeches on the other hand. This led to a further distinction being made between plays that move closer to either side of this continuum of action and inaction. As described by Carol Martin in her Article “Theater of the Real”, she makes the following definitions for reality-based theater:

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While there may be no universal agreement on individual terms, there

is an emerging consensus that theatre of the real includes documentary theatre,

verbatim theatre, reality-based theatre, theatre-of-fact, theatre of witness,

tribunal theatre, nonfiction theatre, restored village performances, war and

battle reenactments, and autobiographical theatre. All of these types of theatre

claim a relationship to reality […] These methods include, but are not limited

to: theatre created from the verbatim use of transcripts, facts, trials,

autobiography, and interviews; theatre created from reenacting the experiences

of witnesses, portraying historic events, and reconstructing real places.

(Martin, 5)

In reality-based theater, the use of both imaginative touches and realistic

Documentary Drama is prevalent. This is partly due to the fact that the playwright is responsible for intervening to reveal the deep implications inherent in the stories, and partly because some stories contain elements that are best laid bare to the audience.

Examples of the latter include how the U.S. began to indefinitely detain and torture people in Guantanamo Bay, with very little real accusations being made (Malpede,

Messina, and Shuman IX).

Reality-based performance can be a powerful form of political theatre, as it has the capacity to shape dialogue out of monologue. When combined with the correct type of audience, it can even more effectively establish a dialogue on stage to provoke further discussion with the audience. While consensus on such performances rarely arises, it is more of a process of instigating debate and dialogue in these cases that become ripe for theatrical portrayal. Such was the promise of Victoria Brittain and

Gillian Slovo's verbatim play, Guantanamo: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom". The

Albayk Jaam | 65 play provides a unique opportunity for the dialogue and political activation that theatre can provide at its best.

Victoria Brittain is a British novelist and a former associate foreign editor of the Guardian and a playwright she has authored several books and is currently a

Research Associate. Gillian Slovo is a South African-born novelist, playwright and memoirist. She has lived in London since 1964. Her other plays include The Riots.

She is also the president of the English Centre of International PEN, and is the winner of several awards.

Guantanamo contains sixteen characters, which include five characters narrating their own stories, family members, and even political figures. It has three acts with a minimalistic stage and setting. It revolves around the case of several

British citizens, all detained at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. The material of the play comes from the testimony of family members and attorneys, public statements from officials, and letters and testimony from the detainees. It uses the story of these men to question US detention practices in Cuba. From the opening moments of the play, accusation and interrogation take a central role on the stage.

Guantanamo starts with a monologue spoken by Lord Justice Johan van Zyl Steyn, of the UK Supreme Court of Appeal. The speaker is positioned in the front and center, which is a staging choice made for all statements delivered by public officials

(Claycomb, 703). At the very onset, Steyn's speech thoroughly condemns US detention tactics at Guantanamo calling them “ill-conceived,” and should be “judged at the bar of informed international opinion,” which questions the very ideals of what human rights have come to be (Brittain and Slovo 7; Act 1, Scene 1). From these very first moments, a British character in a British play is directing charges at the

Albayk Jaam | 66 audience, bringing to them the atrocities that would be “judged”, in a sense, on the stage by the very same audience.

The remainder of the first act, though less confrontational than the opening statement, provides the accounts of those who have suffered due to the actions taken under the pretext of the “war on terror”. Characters appearing on stage include family members, attorneys, and detainees themselves telling the stories of what they and that led to the indefinite detention. The play consists mainly of monologues delivering the stark reality and sparking passion. They tell the detainees side of the story. They are but innocent people engaged in either social work, promulgating Islam, or bringing a business venture to impoverished Gambia. There are more cases lying behind that are never addressed. Seen in the background are people who remain silent throughout the production, staged and caged in the background, sleeping, praying, and marking the time.

Guantanamo moves on to present the audience with another perspective at the outset of the second act, which encourages dialogue. This time, a character delivers a true impression of US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the center stage, rehearsing one of the press conferences. This portrayal may draw laughter, since

Donald Rumsfeld is quite known for his remarks. However, the very same portrayal is a factual presentation, and so the audience finds itself soon back to the grim reality, which is that a laughable matter is in fact a reality. The portrayal of Rumsfeld can be criticized by some as reproducing the easy target of one politician while ignoring many others whose case might be more persuasive.

Subsequent to the portrayal of this political figure at the beginning, the detainees themselves push the play with their compelling story and therefore drive the

Albayk Jaam | 67 cause for action. In Guantanamo, there is a mentally deteriorating Moazzam Begg, who reveals to the audience a portrait of a man suffering human rights abuses bringing him to the brink of collapse. There is also his father, a British citizen and banker, lamenting the virtual disappearance of his son, who had traveled to

Afghanistan with his wife and children to open a school, but was abducted under confusing circumstances in Pakistan. Again another character uses colloquial language, Ruhel Ahmed, provides a gloomy image of youthful energy and naive optimism crushed by detention. There are others who narrated their letters sent home, while still more figures lurked silently around, their stories untold.

Guantanamo, a reality-based play, strives to make itself convincing and to reveal truth. It is taken from spoken evidence recorded by Victoria Brittain, a British journalist, and Gillian Slovo, a South African novelist living in London. To be exact, this play is considered a verbatim play because of its insistence on conveying the reality through the exact words spoken by real witnesses, but there are still other elements such as the written letters (Hammond and Steward, 30). Guantanamo involves many letters since they were the only means of communication between the imprisoned and their families. An example is Bisher’s letters “I was very happy to receive your letter today… Two letters have arrived from her and they should allow me to read them” (Brittain and Gillian 22; Act 2, Scene 1). Guantanamo is a play that serves as a reaction against the indefinite detention system instituted by the Bush administration in prisons in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram in Afghanistan, and

Guantanamo in Cuba, as well as the other hidden prisons around the world. The play is about the famous Tipton Three case, whose names made headlines at the time. The

Tipton Three is the name given to three British citizens from the town of Tipton in

England and who were held in detention without trial or charges by the United States

Albayk Jaam | 68 government for two years in Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba. These people are the main focus of this play, which aims to question the political decisions of the Bush administration in the wake of the war on Afghanistan and Iraq after the

Nine Eleven incident. In this play, the stage turns to what resembles a hearing, with the audience serving the role of the jury. This is reminiscent of an earlier Greek play, the Oresteia, which is famous for its legal proceedings that occur around the end of the last part.

Guantanamo steps in to set things straight. It is a verbatim play where the accused stand before an audience that sees and hears the proceedings, and may even go so far as to offer a judgment, something taken from those held in Guantanamo.

Those who have been denied a trial might testify in their own defense. Their words are channeled through the mouths of actors who become conduits conveying the hidden truths. In Guantanamo, solicitor Gareth Pierce, a real person that is featured in the play, is quoted speaking about the release of the Tipton three saying: “I think perhaps we’re very calloused. We read, we watch, we hear about atrocities –we know what man’s inhumanity to man consists of, we know all that, but don’t sufficiently register it” (Norton-Taylor). This is perhaps the first step on the road to solving the problem, the part where the problem is recognized. Once brought into awareness, one can start to realize the dilemma and to think of how to handle it. The character iof solicitor Gareth Pierce further points out in the play that:

GARETH PIERCE. We don’t not have the capacity to take it in and react in

the way we should as human beings. But when you have in a kitchen

men you’re getting to know and they’re talking about it, not because

you’re interrogating them[…..] Maybe it’s a testimony of every survivor

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from a concentration camp or a massacre or a…. How do you tell it?

How do ordinary words tell it? But yet they do if you are realizing the

people who are telling it to you are the people who’ve survived it.

(Brittain and Slovo 38; Act 3, Scene 1)

Gareth in the play is trying to provide a sense of legal context for what is happening to the detainees. This can be true about the purpose the playwrights of such dramas are trying to achieve. To have the characters tell the story to the larger audience listening to them in hopes of igniting their empathy beyond the comfort zone they draw around themselves and where they stay.

Guantanamo is one of the plays that can be also classified into the genre of theatre called "tribunal plays", which portrays the complex details of subjects of public concern in the form of drama (Martin, 6). This form of theatre is for storytelling, in which the characters address the audience directly (Norton-Taylor).

Everything depends on the power and truth of the narrative, and the subject of the indefinite detention of hundreds of people at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba makes the case even more appealing.

No end has been declared to the "war on terror", and no tribunal is going to be held any time soon to thoroughly examine it or mete out judgments. This is why

Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo have taken their words from interviews specifically conducted with former Guantanamo prisoners, their families and lawyers, from the letters of those still incarcerated and from the public statements of renowned politicians such as Jack Straw and Donald Rumsfeld. The audience might find some of the statements made by the Secretary of Defense to be amusing, although laughter does not last for long when the direct consequences of the policies taken are compared

Albayk Jaam | 70 with reality. Letters dispatched home from Guantánamo are read in contrast to statements from politicians like Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of

Defense, who is heard answering reporters using an obscure maze of makeshift explanations.

The only visible villains in this piece of theater are the politicians, which are mainly the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and Jack Straw, British Home

Secretary, to a lesser extent. They represent the ones who ignored the Geneva

Convention and humanitarian attempts at protecting or freeing the prisoners. This piece of theatre imparts how it feels for the victims and their families to be caught up in the blind apathetic machinery of a superpower fighting an unknown enemy.

Something reminiscent of a Kafkaesque setting, where nothing is certain and it all seems surreal.

In addition to Moazzam Begg and Ruhel Ahmed, the story of Jamal al-Harith comes to light. He is Manchester-born African Muslim who stumbled from a Taliban jail in Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay. Al-Harith had embarked on a religious pilgrimage to Pakistan but wound up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, with disastrous results, according to him. His story, similar to the stories of others, has a sense of a shadowy world of shifting boundaries and dimensions that pervade the first half of the play, which is largely devoted to recounting the details of how the men initially came to be incarcerated.

The story of Wahab al-Rawi, an Iraqi citizen who later became a British businessman, is also tackled. He was taken from Gambia to Afghanistan and then to

Cuba. Both have been freed, but al-Rawi's brother is still in detention, apparently because his sporting interests qualified him to train terrorists in the opinion of the US.

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The story of these prisoners are quite astonishing. They were actually incarcerated in

West Africa, where they had traveled to start a peanut oil processing plant. They were arrested for suspicious activity, and eventually were locked up in a prison that was built with the same materials they had brought to Africa for their own business. From

Africa, one of them is flown to Kandahar before being shipped off to Cuba, making a more plausible case in designating as an enemy combatant captured in Afghanistan.

In Guantanamo, there is a contrast between the moments that provide a grim laugh at statements made by Rumsfeld and the personal accounts of the characters in the play about the reality of being in Guantanamo. For example, suicide attempts in

Guantanamo appeared to have fallen sharply, but in reality they had simply been redefined as "manipulative self-injurious behaviour" (Council of Europe, 58). Britain is also considered an accomplice in this play because of its denial of justice mentioned by referring to the indefinite detainees at Belmarsh prison in London. There are other moments that prove to be comical to an extent. While Wahab al-Rawi’s description of how he and his brother were arrested in Gambia when they went to set up a business is shocking, he still displays a grim, defying humor in the face of the illogic of his captors and interrogators. However, the fact that his brother, Bisher, was eventually sent to Guantanamo, leaves no room for laughter.

Given the material used in Guantanamo, there is no need for exaggerated dramatic acting. The facts literally speak for themselves. The audience at the end of the play is left stirred with a sense that they had lost the ability to seek refuge in ignorance. In both its unadorned presentation and its activist aims, the play is considered part of the verbatim theater since it is structured mostly out of interviews and letters from current or former inmates of the military prison camps in Cuba, along

Albayk Jaam | 72 with the testimonies made by their families back in their homes. Guantanamo sets out to show how the treatment the prisoners are receiving constitutes a gross violation of the ideals of justice that had been approved internationally. This tone is established from the very beginning, as Lord Justice Steyn refers to the Guantanamo military installation as a “legal black hole” which is engineered by the U.S. government to put the detainees “beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts, and at the mercy of the victors.” (Brittain and Slovo 7; Act 1, Scene 1).

The monologues by the attorneys attempting to set the legal context for what is happening, the statements by Lord Justice Steyn have a formal eloquence clearly meant to spark anger and fury. This kind of formality might cause a feeling of attending a lecture, but it is hard to be dulled when the audience is hooked with the stories of the people in the play. Their senses stay sharp as they hear about the suffering told via detailed accounts of life in prison, observing how the detainees change tone from optimism to apathy and even drawing closer to insanity.

Guantanamo approaches its end after having delivered its message in several ways. Bisher’s path into hopelessness is charted convincingly. The audience remains immobile throughout the play much like the detainees portrayed in front of them.

When the performance ends, they emerge having shared not only the claustrophobic nightmare and waiting dilemma caused by indefinite detention, but also the sympathy towards fellow people whom now they understand. The audience leaves the play taking away with them some of the most memorable moments from the play.

A number of devastating moments can be found, but perhaps the one that clings most is that of a father reunited with his son, who surprisingly exclaims that

Albayk Jaam | 73 despite everyone crying, “He don’t cry. He say, dad, don’t worry, I’m OK. He’s got less feeling, less feeling than before” (Brittain and Slovo 37; Act 3, Scene 1).

Another thing that leaves a strong impact is Tom Clark, a British citizen whose sister was killed in New York states that despite his terrible loss, he still calls for the release of the prisoners. In the play, he is quoted saying that “I just remember thinking that [the Middle East] was …. [something] she actually genuinely cared about. And that was one of the ….. things that me most sad. Aside from … her loss”

(Brittain and Slovo 21; Act 2, Scene 1). The audience leaves having witnessed the innocent British prisoners transitioning to a stage of being broken both mentally and physically before their release, or while still awaiting it today. Guantanamo successfully shows how an authentic depiction of reality can be as engaging as the more imaginative forms of theater. The real words of real stories prove to be very powerful, leaving an echo resonating within the audience that extends far beyond the stage. The achievement of Guantanamo as a play is more than innovative in terms on stage technique, as the content delivered by the play remains as a whole both relevant and persuasive to the immediate audience in theater and to the remote observer lodged at home.

Comparing Guantanamo with another play using a different reality-based approach yields interesting results. This second play in this chapter is Bill Cain’s 9

Circles. Bill Cain is an American playwright, producer, and a Jesuit priest. His plays include Equivocation, Stand Up Tragedy, and How to Write a New Book for the Bible and he has received several awards. 9 Circles contains ten characters and consists of nine scenes or “circles” as described by the playwright. Characters come in and out of the stage while announcing the change in time and place. 9 Circles is a play that can

Albayk Jaam | 74 be described as a reality-based drama. However, while Guantanamo is a verbatim play, 9 Circles is a docudrama in the sense that it takes its material from formal sources but still exercises some liberties in departing from reality while depicting the story on stage.

In 9 Circles, there is a character that comes to a premature end before it even begins, the victim of the soldier around whom the play revolves. The soldier is being discharged but has no understanding of why, as is evident from his speech with the

Lieutenant who acknowledges “You know, for a grunt, you’re pretty smart”, to which

Reeves answers with a smile, “That not the consensus of opinion of the faculty at my school sir” (Cain 257; Act 1, Scene 1). The play is based on the military career and subsequent trial of Steven Dale Green, who convicted is by a federal court in 2009 of raping and killing an Iraqi 14-year-old girl and murdering her family. In the play,

Daniel Edward Reeves was granted a special waiver to join the army. This is based on the true story of Steven Dale Green, a high school dropout with a troubled emotional history who had been imprisoned because of several charges just days before he was allowed to enlist in an army desperate for recruits. It was the time before the U.S. economic crash, at the height of clashes in Iraq in 2005, when Army recruiters were regularly granting waivers to fill their quotas.

If Green were troubled before he entered into combat, it would not be surprising that he raped, murdered, and burnt the body of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl after murdering her family, including a toddler. The play does not alter these basic facts. Steven Dale Green was sentenced to multiple life sentences for his crime, but later committed suicide because he felt unjustly treated as those who helped in the act received lesser sentences. It is ironic that this was the reason for committing suicide,

Albayk Jaam | 75 and not guilt for the crime. Cain, who wrote the play before the trial, gives the character, Reeves, the death penalty. In Cain's play, the victim cannot exist on the stage except exist within the mind of Reeves and only after he starts to reflect on what was done. Khorsheed's presence becomes increasingly vivid in the mind of Reeves, her rapist, as he is injected with lethal drugs and dies.

Cain summarizes the argument in 9 Circles: "Three thousand Americans got killed. Somebody has to pay," says Reeves, sounding like a member of the Bush administration. "Forty thousand Americans get killed in traffic accidents every year ...

Based on your logic, we should be bombing car dealerships," responds the army lawyer (Cain 273; Act 1, Scene 3). Cain is a Jesuit priest, which explains the reason behind the play's title, which refers to Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Dante navigates in his version a descent into the "nine circles of hell". In Cain's play, Reeves passes through his discharge from the Army and various judicial and administrative procedures, which roughly parallel the nine circles mentioned in Dante's Inferno. Cain structured the play so other cast members would return to play multiple roles, at each different circle. This further argues for a presentation of types rather than real characters in the play. This display of types is reminiscent of medieval plays, such as

Everyman. Cain’s play however upgrades the version of its protagonist, and not taking the easy path of demonizing the protagonist.

In 9 Circles, Reeves is confronted, in each succeeding circle, with army personnel, lawyers, psychiatrists, and even an insincere preacher who tries to get

Reeves to embrace Jesus before being executed. For most of the characters encountering Reeves, he merely represent a "case" to be dealt with in a different way.

One lawyer returns to Reeves several times promising him that if Reeves was able to

Albayk Jaam | 76 make him really understand his story and why he raped and murdered the 14-year-old girl, then the lawyer might be able to win over the sympathy of the jury.

9 Circles itself hints at the trouble Reeves had already been through before enlisting in the army and later joining the war in Iraq. Cain's point is that Reeves, who ends up committing horrible crimes that disturb the very judicial system prepare to deal with such matters, should not have been allowed to join the army and carry weaponry in the first place. Reeves was stressed by war, which would send anyone over the edge. Someone who is already troubled is bound to cause more harm when thrown into the frontlines. Since 9 Circles follows the more imaginative path, some of the characters in the play end up sounding like the mouthpieces of the anti-war playwright rather than real characters. This is also true when it comes to Green’s sentence, life in prison, which was different from that of the death penalty that Reeves faced in the play. The play itself is structured into 9 Circles, starting with Circle 1, when Reeves receives an Honorable Discharge from the army in Iraq. The type of person being presented can be known from his speech with the lieutenant discharging him:

REEVES. I think – I think it’s a euphemism, sir. I’m no expert, but I think a

personality disorder can be an advantage in certain circumstances.

LIEUTENANT. Such as:

LIEUTENANT. It doesn’t bother you?

REEVES. Some things don’t bother me the way they bother other people.

LIEUTENANT. Like?

REEVES. The basics, sir. Killing people. It bothers some people, sir. Reeves:

Sir, we came here to kill people, sir. (Cain 256; Act 1, Scene 1).

Albayk Jaam | 77

At first, Reeves appears callous and apathetic, but as he slowly spirals downward through levels of torment and introspection, he starts to realize the magnitude of his actions. Several other characters visit Reeves in several capacities, such as army officer, lawyer, counselor, and pastor. Each one of them has an agenda of his or her own, which culminates in a bewildering circle rotating between help and harsh condemnation. These visits also reveal how 9 Circles contains verbal wit and verbal humor that are recurrent in each of the circles. However, the tone of the play is not lost as such humor becomes less frequent the more the play progresses. In the opening scene or circle, it dawns on the lieutenant that Reeves is smart “for a grunt,” and Reeves brushes off the compliment responding, “That was not the consensus of opinion of the faculty at my high school, sir,” with a smirk (Cain 257; Act 1, scene 1).

In that comic moment, it is possible to envision in a flash where he came from and how he landed here. This causes the laughter to stop short when realizing the reality of Reeves’ deteriorating situation. Each of the circles refers to Dante’s nine horrifying circles of Hell, here called “Iraq,” “Federal Prison,” “the Trial,” and so on. As each figure enters and exits the soldier’s limited space, they take away with them a small piece of his already deteriorating sanity.

9 Circles as a play successfully portrays how Reeves progressively spirals out of control and down into the “inferno” tailored for him by Cain. Furthermore, the play weaves a spiraling maze with Reeves going through each, descending into the next circle by the wide range of motivations each visitor seeks. One wants to save Reeves from his sins, while another wants to be known as the person who saved the accused murderer from the death penalty, while a third tries to understand and empathize with

Reeves, even if that led to losing her career. These conflicting motivations tug at

Reeves from each side, whose mind is left bewildered before finally coming to terms

Albayk Jaam | 78 to what happened before the end of the infernal journey. The play portrays a realistic story yet intertwined with imaginative elements that make it deliver a lasting message while exemplifying how reality-based theater can remain authentic and yet appealing.

The achievement of 9 Circles is exemplified in bringing to the stage the innovative use of content that is usually reserved for formal political settings, using everyday realistic language and situations. The use of reality does not bind the playwright by its limitations, as the play remains creative in the presentation of realistic themes in a different flavor mirroring a certain theme that can be traced back to the times of morality plays.

Examining both plays reflects the different comparisons that can be made.

Guantanamo might be a British play in all respects, be that the characters, the playwright, or even the theme, but it shares its theme with 9 Circles, which is an

American play. They both offer a portrait of the consequences of the U.S. government policies and practices. Guantanamo examines how these policies have resulted in hundreds of men being incarcerated indefinitely in Cuba, who have no access to human rights, let alone legal counsel. The play aims to expose the stark reality of the painful and harsh costs people pay for this side of the global “war on terror.” By putting on stage the real stories of real men, the play easily targets the arbitrary nature of the attempts USA made to strike back at the terrorists. The characters experiences are disturbing in their similarity to the horrors portrayed by Kafka, but this serves only to make the testimonies of these characters eventually build up to form a powerful criticism of political mistakes. The play does not entirely dwell on American policies, as it alludes, however slightly, to the British government locking up a dozen people indefinitely at Belmarsh Prison in London, on similar grounds and without any

Albayk Jaam | 79 charges. The play successfully delivers an honest picture through the use evidence and reliance on fact, while avoiding dishonesty.

In 9 Circles, the criticism takes a more indirect route to deliver its message. It portrays the other side of the coin spent by the machine of political agendas, the trauma of soldiers. Reeves’s descent through the nine levels of a modern hell in the

Kafkaesque sense stirs a critique of various decisions made by several institutions. It criticizes the army recruiting standards, the burden placed on the society, and the failure to provide a troubled man like Daniel Reeves a path beyond “jail or the

Army”. An army lawyer tells Reeves that “any warrior can make the enemy feel pain,” but laments the fact that Reeves’s actions made his own side “feel the pain of the enemy.” He later tells him that making the others feel pain “isn’t the end of a war.

That is the end of war.” (Cain 276; Act 1, Scene 3). The army lawyer is aware of the situation, and the very fact that he criticizes the political decisions and policies and their consequences summarizes the argument of the play. The consequences of ill- made political decisions are borne by both perpetrators and victims who lie on the fields of battle while politicians remain safe from harm in their offices. 9 Circles is successful in delivering a compelling picture of real life events that may otherwise be omitted by the media. This again supports the quality of truth and honesty through the reliance on evidence and fact.

Guantanamo and 9 Circles share more than just the theme. There is a

Kafkaesque feeling of dizziness and loss experienced in both plays. Franz Kafka had already immortalized a scenario in his novel, The Trial, in the early 20th century. The novel has since been the basis for countless various forms of productions using the same persuasive scenario. His novel presents a nightmarish illogical experience that

Albayk Jaam | 80 lacks even a logical structure. On an anxious night, you face a seemingly surreal and dreamlike experience. You are arrested by uniformed officers for a crime that is never specified but that you are sure you did not commit. There is no logic, and no rationality perceived in the actions or the questions you are asked in the interrogations that ensue. This means that there is no way to answer your persecutors in your defense, which entails there will be no way out.

The way the two plays examined in this chapter are structured reveals that they share differing levels of Kafkaesque elements that are worth examining. In

Guantanamo, the interviews are presented by different rotating characters each telling only a part of the story at a time. The very stories heard represent scenes that remind us of the nightmare of being arrested in the middle of the night without knowing why or what is happening. This was also the real-life situation described by Jamal al-

Harith, Bisher al-Rawi, Moazzam Begg and Ruhel Ahmed. 9 Circles is closer to a

Kafkaesque hell both in the literal sense and because of the transitions between each circle that leave Reeves unaware at each one of what is going on. Even the characters that come to visit him are not named, and are simply known by their titles or jobs, further emphasizing the point. The transitions of the play highly mirror the confusing transition associated with Kafkaism. After a brief opening scene, the play shifts to the

United States, where Reeves wakes up in a holding cell with no memory of how he got there. He is completely oblivious to what he had done, and has to be reminded that he is accused of heinous crimes against Iraqi civilians including rape and murder. His path through the justice system is a path through the modern urban hell described by

Kafka. He trudges confusedly and angrily, handling manners in a way detrimental to his interests. The Kafkaesque surrealism portrayed by the play is counterbalanced by

Albayk Jaam | 81 the staging. The pace of the play is circular and the actors characters themselves rotate between characters.

An analysis of a play would be incomplete without examining how the set is presented on stage. The set of Guantanamo is populated by idle figures in orange jumpsuits, resembling the bare cages of Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, a place where there is no access to lawyers and a one-way ticket to staying for an unspecified period. The viewers of the play feel like participants and sympathize with the stories of the prisoners and families being recounted, learning about the fates and suffering at the place. They understand the reasons for why people deteriorate mentally in such places and understand what it must have been like for the victims in other places.

Overall, the set is simple, portraying prison units similar to cages where the men in orange clothing move within small cage units, occasionally exercising or praying, to accentuate the small space in which they have come to live and which portrays the lack of humane treatment. The lighting itself helps focus on the prison itself or the more abstract spaces where testimony is given. This simplistic set is effective as it embodies the description of what the solicitor calls in the play a "terrible, stark, medieval horror" spreading in the prison.

The stage in 9 Circles is a stark stage, which is similar to the minimalistic of

Guantanamo. There is a metallic circle on the floor, and as different characters interact with Reeves, they leave something symbolic on the stage on their way out.

The audience seating is arranged into a semi-circle around the action. In this way, the audience feels that it is in the position to judge, which is something they end up doing.

The straightforward scenic design of the play acknowledges the play intellectually driven progress. Circles or circular shapes abound, in the form of semi-circular

Albayk Jaam | 82 benches set inside a prison cell closed by arc shaped bars. There is a helmet on the stage besides a rifle to remind the audience of the fact that what is going on stage is the result of war. On top of the cell is shown the number of each circle Reeves goes through as the play progresses.

The use of documentary evidence and facts on the stage provokes several questions about what is to become of the role of actors. Verbatim theater asks them to deliver a verbatim speech or report like the name suggests, leaving them with little or no room for improvisation. Their mission is to portray reality to the closest extent possible. However, they still can strive to portray the genuine emotions of the people they represent. They might even offer different perspectives into how people’s reactions might change in real life. Since this type of theater focuses on speech more than anything, there is a strong emphasis laid on the tones of characters. In

Guantanamo, Mr. Begg the father of Moazzam, is simply sad, aggrieved and uncomprehending. While Wahab al-Rawi explains his ordeal, the tone is angry and even cynical at times. The tones of these characters are contrasted with the businesslike formal tone of politicians. There is even a light touch of sarcasm felt when Donald Rumsfeld speaks in press conferences, angrily rebuffs journalists’ questions about the prisoners’ treatment, such as when he says, “to be in an 8-by-10 cell in beautiful sunny Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is not an — inhumane treatment.”

(Brittain and Slovo 26; Act 2, Scene 1).

Although the play consists primarily of monologues and has no support in the form of a dramatic context, the actors playing the roles of the prisoners and their family members fully embrace their roles, capable of making the audience feel. In reality-based theater in general, and verbatim theater in particular, there is a powerful

Albayk Jaam | 83 reliance on the persuasiveness of documentary evidence, rather than theatrical drama.

This why the performers have to achieve and maintain sincerity and integrity throughout their roles. Despite being a verbatim play, there are characters that do not speak at all. There are the detainees impersonated in the backgrounds seen lying quietly inside their small cages for the duration of the performance. Their stories are unheard, but their presence speaks for itself as the victims of an undiscriminating detention process.

Performers in Guantanamo are required to perform more than one role.

Something they have to achieve convincingly, even though acting they might end in contrasting roles. Given the play’s inclusion of several characters from different backgrounds and levels of fluency, the performers have to take the nuances of nationality and accents into account.

In 9 Circles, performers are allowed by virtue of the play being a docudrama to use their own devices to a certain extent. The play uses the same cast of performers to portray different characters. This makes characters resemble types more than realistic figures. A representation of types on the stage brings to mind the medieval dramas acted to educate the masses. If Reeves is placed in the context of those medieval plays, he can be said to resemble a certain type of character type around whom the play revolves. The fact that Reeves is portrayed as having a mental disorder allows the performer playing his role to have greater freedom. He is free to swing frequently from a sympathetic victim to an apathetic aggressor. Reeves is torn because of the deeds he refuses to acknowledge, trying to forget or bury them inside.

His attempts to escape from reality by showing an apathy and trying to make jokes constantly. Reeves remains fidgeting on the edge of sanity and never realizes or

Albayk Jaam | 84 accepts to realize the truth until late in the play. The rest of the characters in the play serve the roles of types, with the same performers portraying several characters.

Among the characters in 9 Circles is the stern army attorney directing military scorn at Reeves’s deficiencies. There is the hesitant pastor who confronts pure evil for the first time in his religious life, and there is the businesslike lieutenant dismissing

Reeves of duty, talking to him casually. There is also the defense lawyer willing to save him at any cost, going as far as to ignore the details of haunting memories and bloody images from Iraq told by the soldier. The lawyer is merely interested in finding proof, as he keeps asking, “Where’s the proof?” He knows that the person he is dealing with is not acting in a normal way, but he maintains a cold calculating approach. The lawyer disregards the terrible accusations and attempts to focus on achieving what he has in mind. There are also the roles of a young lawyer, a shrink, and a prosecutor played by the same woman. The roles are connected in a unique way, but still each shows a different perspective of the personality of Reeves through the different interactions they have with him. They explore fragments of his history and are able to push him to understand his own dimensions and motivations.

9 Circles can be described as a modern “morality play” providing an allegory, and Reeves is a type. The damage caused by war does not only affect Reeves, as his actions show what politics and war can cause among people. Reeves is one person suffering the consequences of his actions, but resembles many others who suffer in different ways, and suffer different versions of hell. This hell is not even limited to the perpetrators, as the victims have also been through hell themselves. This is further attested by the fact that just before Reeves dies, he goes through a moment of a short- lived redemption, hinting at the fact that he was the victim of the politics of his

Albayk Jaam | 85 country. In such a way, the audience begins to contemplate how much torment the wars are causing, both by those waging them and those around them.

Albayk Jaam | 86

Conclusion

Theater plays a major role when it comes to politics, to the extent where the term "political theater" has come to be widely used nowadays, as an evidence of the persisting importance of the genre. Further evidence can be found in how theater was originally used in the context of Athens as a tool to counter the effects of battles on the veteran warriors. The theatrical techniques may have changed due to changing times, such as the lack of a chorus and enacting violence on stage, as well as the numerous modern techniques available in the repertoire of modern playwrights.

Moreover, Modern political theater can have other aims, such as portraying the other, addressing current issues, and increasing the awareness of the audience. Theater can teach many things about politics, revealing the atrocities and exceptions made that are kept from the public, as well as shedding light on the aftermath and reality of political decisions made bearing different slogans. The role of political theater today is more complex in that it serves several goals and at often is left open to interpretation. While the role of theater today can be said to have expanded, it remains true to its origins with regards to its themes. The link between modern drama and politics is a strong one. This relation can be traced to many facts, such as the publicity of both and the intellectuality of the audiences.

Modern playwrights are more conscious about their roles when writing plays, and they either enhance that role or try to minimize its impact. Plays within the political genre are often written to address urgent political conflicts where the playwrights respond in hopes of resolving ongoing political dilemmas. The ties of theater to politics are complex and multifaceted, making it hard at times to tell the

Albayk Jaam | 87 two apart. Theater and politics tend to intermingle in ways that make each a reflection of the other. In shedding light on the various aspects of drama and politics, it becomes possible to gauge to what extent drama is political or otherwise. Looking into how often political actions are described using metaphors from the theater, a notion of the subtle underlying connection can be maintained and further substantiated with evidence that establishes such an important connection in a perhaps more tangible way.

Political drama can be summed up as follows. It is a form of political drama that examines the human condition through the lens of politics. It is no real surprise that people would want to produce political dramas, nor is it a surprise that demand for them is so high. After all, they mirror much of what makes us human. The dramatic aspect rises mostly through what makes the dramatic arts so interesting, which is the interplay of interactions between people. Romantic comedies are popular because they show people trying to be their best. Representation of war are memorable because of the bonds seen between the characters and the bigger picture in which they stand. Given this context, it is no surprise that political theater is so dramatic. Such theater mirrors interactions that affect the whole world. It shows a glimpse of how the fate of entire nations becomes determined by people who have the same demons as ourselves, meaning that they are both fallible and relatable. In short, political theater provides a perfect combination that grabs our attention and refuses to let go.

In conclusion, political theater maintains more than just the power to affect the whole world. This type of theater reveals that politicians and soldiers face the same range of emotions as anyone else. However, playwrights maintain the ability to

Albayk Jaam | 88 determine the spectrum and range of emotion, which leads to the possibility of presenting serious content in a humorous tone or vice versa. Human emotion and political decisions make for a very captivating mixture. Politics and theater are inseparable, and are two side of the same coin. Even though theater may not be directly political, it is shaped and affected by the politics of era it is written in. The process portrayed might have no solution, much like the characters that are lost and are attempting to reconcile with themselves. Political representation on the modern stage is an important topic that presents more than meets the eye.

Albayk Jaam | 89

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Appendices Albayk Jaam | 100

Appendix I

Brief Chronology of Modern Political Plays

1953 Joan Littlewood opens Theatre Workshop at Stratford East before transferring to the West End

Stratford East John Arden: Live Like Pigs staged at Royal Court

1954 English Stage Company founded by Ronald Shelagh Delaney: A Taste of Honey Arnold Wesker: Chicken Soupwith Barley staged at Duncan and Neville Blond. Brendan Behan’s first Royal Court play, The Quare Fellow, staged by Joan Littlewood at Stratford East 1959 The Mermaid Theatre opens

1955 Anthony Eden replaces Winston Churchill as John Arden: Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, directed by Lindsay Anderson Prime Minister

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952) Arnold Wesker: Roots, directed by John Dexter Arnold Wesker: The Kitchen performed at Arts Theatre, London

1956 The Suez crisis. Soviet troops enter Hungary 1960 John F. Kennedy elected US President

First season of English Stage Company (now with Centre 42 founded.

George Devine) at Royal Court Theatre includes Harold Pinter: The Caretaker premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. John Arden: The Happy Haven, directed by William

Visit to London of Berliner Ensemble with Bertolt Gaskill Arnold Wesker: I’m Talking About Jerusalem, Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Mother

Courage. directed by John Dexter at the Royal Court

Death of Brecht. 1961 US invasion of Cuba (Bay of Pigs). Berlin

Peter Brook directs Paul Scofield in Hamlet Wall erected

1957 Harold Macmillan replaces Anthony Eden as Peter Hall as artistic director of the Stratford

Prime Minister Memorial Theatre, leases Aldwych and founds the Royal Shakespeare Company. John Osborne’s The Entertainer staged at Royal

Court, directed by Tony Richardson. John Osborne: Luther

Samuel Beckett: Endgame 1962 Cuban missile crisis. First success of the

1958 Founding of European Common Market. First Beatles march by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to Peter Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty season. Edward

Aldermaston Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Bond: The Pope’s Wedding Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party flops after one week. Arnold Wesker: Chips with Everything,directed by

Brendan Behan’s The Hostage performed at John Dexter at the Royal Court

Albayk Jaam | 101

1963 President Kennedy assassinated. Alec Gun Arnold Wesker: Their Very Own and Golden

Douglas-Home replaces Macmillan as Prime City

Minister 1967 Pound devalued. 50,000 demonstrate against

The National Theatre opens at the Old Vic Vietnam War in Washington. Six-Day War between

John Arden: The Workhouse Donkey Israel and Arab nations

Joan Littlewood: Oh What A Lovely War Joe Orton murdered. Alan Ayckbourn’s first success

1964 Harold Wilson becomes first Labour Prime with Relatively Speaking. Peter Nichols: A Day in

Minister since 1951. Lyndon B. Johnson elected US the Death of Joe Egg

President 1968 Assassination of Martin Luther King. Student

Peter Brook’s productions of Shakespeare’s King revolt in Paris: the so-called ev ´ enements ´ . Riots

Lear and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. John Osborne: in Chicago during

Inadmissible Evidence Democratic convention. Russians invade

John Arden: Armstrong’s Last Goodnight premiered Czechoslovakia. at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre Restriction of black immigration into Britain

1965 Intensification of the Vietnam War. Anti-war Abolition of Lord Chamberlain’s powers of demonstrations in USA. Race riots in Los Angeles censorship.

Death of George Devine. Harold Pinter’s The David Hare founds Portable Theatre with Tony

Homecoming. Bicat. Charles

CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre) and Marowitz opens the Open Space Theatre. Red the People Show founded. Theatre in Education Ladder and Welfare State founded. initiated. John Osborne: A Patriot for Me. Frank John Arden: The Hero Rises Up

Marcus: The Killing of Sister George Peter Barnes: The Ruling Class

Edward Bond: Saved Edward Bond: Early Morning

David Mercer: Ride a Cock Horse Edward Bond: Narrow Road to the Deep North

1966 Wilson announces ‘standstill’ in wages and John McGrath: Bakke’s Night of Fame prices. Mao Alan Plater: Close the Coalhouse Door

Tse-tung: Quotations of Chairman Mao 1969 Nixon becomes US President. British troops

Peter Brook’s US at Aldwych. Raymond Williams: sent into Northern Ireland in response to sectarian

Modern Tragedy violence

John McGrath: Events while Guarding the Bofors Trevor Nunn takes over Royal Shakespeare

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Company from Peter Hall David Edgar: Tedderella

Howard Brenton: Christie in Love Trevor Griffiths: Thermidor

Howard Brenton: Gum and Goo Portable Theatre: Lay-By

Peter Nichols: The National Health 1972 Beginning of the Watergate affair. Britain

John Spurling: Macrune’s Guevara imposes direct rule on Northern Ireland

1970 Conservative government returned to power, John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy: The Island of led by Edward Heath. First time 18-year-olds able the Mighty to vote. US National John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy: The

Guard shoots four student protesters against Ballygombeen Bequest

Vietnam War. Howard Barker: Alpha Alpha

Marxist President elected in Chile. Women’s Howard Brenton: Hitler Dances

Liberation Howard Brenton, David Edgar and David Hare:

Group and Gay Liberation Front founded England’s Ireland performed in Amsterdam

Peter Brook directs A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Caryl Churchill: Owners

David Storey: Home Trevor Griffiths: Sam, Sam

Trevor Griffiths: Occupations David Hare: The Great Exhibition

David Hare: Slag John McGrath: Serjeant Musgrave Dances On

John McGrath: Random Happenings in the Arnold Wesker: The Old Ones

Hebrides 1973 Britain joins the Common Market. Arab oil

David Mercer: After Haggerty embargo; fuel crisis. Chilean president overthrown

Arnold Wesker: The Friends by military coup

1971 Fighting in Vietnam spills over into Laos and Peter Hall takes over National Theatre from

Cambodia. Laurence Olivier

Introduction of internment in Northern Ireland; Edward Bond: The Sea violence escalates Edward Bond: Bingo

Founding of 7:84 and General Will. Harold Pinter’s Howard Brenton: Magnificence

Old Times Howard Brenton and David Hare: Brassneck

Edward Bond: Lear David Edgar and Howard Brenton: A Fart for

Howard Brenton: Scott of the Antarctic Europe

David Edgar: The National Interest Trevor Griffiths: The Party

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John McGrath: The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, David Hare: Teeth ’n’ Smiles

Black Oil John McGrath: Little Red Hen

1974 Worldwide inflation. Wilson replaces Heath, Arnold Wesker: The Journalists published after Heath had failed to rally the nation against the 1976 First nuclear treaty between USA and USSR. miners in the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’. James Callaghan replaces Wilson as Prime Minister.

Violence in Northern Ireland spreads to Britain: Blacks riot in South Africa. Jimmy Carter elected terrorist bomb in Houses of Parliament. Nixon US President forced to resign over Watergate, replaced by Gerald The National Theatre opens on the South Bank. Gay

Ford Joint Stock and Women’s Theatre Group Sweatshop founded founded Howard Brenton: Weapons of Happiness

Howard Brenton: The Churchill Play Caryl Churchill: Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

David Edgar: Dick Deterred Caryl Churchill: Vinegar Tom

David Hare: Knuckle David Edgar: Destiny

John McGrath: The Imperial Policeman Arnold Wesker: The Merchant performed in

Arnold Wesker: The Wedding Feast performed in Stockholm

Stockholm 1977 US protests about harassment of Czech

1975 Margaret Thatcher succeeds Heath as leader dissidents of Conservatives. Robert Bolt: State of Revolution

Fall of Saigon Caryl Churchill: Traps

Opening of the Riverside Studios, Hammer smith. David Edgar: Wreckers

Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Stephen Poliakoff: 1978 Marxist guerrillas seize power in Nicaragua

City Sugar Harold Pinter: Betrayal

John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy: The Non-Stop Howard Barker: The Hang of the Gaol

Connolly Show Edward Bond: The Bundle

Howard Barker: Claw Edward Bond: The Woman

Howard Barker: Stripwell Howard Brenton, David Hare and Trevor Griffiths:

Edward Bond: The Fool Deeds

Caryl Churchill: Objections to Sex and Violence David Edgar: The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs

Trevor Griffiths: Comedians David Hare: Plenty

David Hare: Fanshen David Mercer: Cousin Vladimir

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1979 Margaret Thatcher wins general election, Stephen Poliakoff: Breaking the Silence pursues monetarist policies 1985 Gorbachev becomes Soviet leader, initiates

Edward Bond: The Worlds perestroika, a liberalization of the USSR

Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine Edward Bond: War Plays

1980 Reagan elected US President. Start of Iran– David Hare and Howard Brenton: Pravda

Iraq War 1986 David Rudkin: The Saxon Shore

Death of David Mercer 1987 Thatcher re-elected for third term

Howard Brenton: The Romans in Britain Caryl Churchill: Serious Money

David Edgar: Nicholas Nickleby (adaptation) David Edgar: Entertaining Strangers performed at

1981 Greenham Common Peace Camp starts the National Theatre

John McGrath publishes A Good Night Out. Samuel 1988 Passing of so-called Clause 28,banning the

Beckett: Catastrophe promotion of homosexuality in schools. End of

Howard Barker: No End of Blame conflict between Iraq and Iran

1982 Falklands conflict Howard Barker: The Bite of the Night

The Royal Shakespeare Company moves to the Howard Brenton: Greenland

Barbican David Hare: The Secret Rapture

Caryl Churchill: TopGirls Harold Pinter: Mountain Language

Trevor Griffiths: Oi! for England Timberlake Wertenbaker: Our Country’s Good

David Hare: A Map of the World performed in 1989 George Bush elected US President. Collapse

Adelaide of Communism in Eastern Europe. Dismantling of

1983 Thatcher re-elected with landslide victory the Berlin Wall. Vaclav

Caryl Churchill: Fen Havel becomes President of the Czech Republic

Sarah Daniels: Masterpieces Caryl Churchill: Icecream

David Edgar: Maydays

1984 Reagan re-elected. Thatcher confronts unions, especially in the long-lasting miners’ strike

Arts Council ‘Glory of the Garden’ policy

Caryl Churchill: Softcops

John McGrath: Imperial Policeman

Harold Pinter: One for the Road

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