British playwright David Hare’s Stuff Happens is that rarity of rarities — a serious contemporary history play. We’re all familiar with satire of daily events, but Hare’s play uses a seamless mixture of documented statements and imagined dialogue to present the political manoeuvreing in American and British politics from just before the September 11 terrorist attacks to the US-led invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, to George W. Bush’s now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1 of that year. It must have been thrilling to see Stuff Happens when it opened in London in September 2004, since the tide had not yet turned against Bush, Tony Blair and the war in general. Now a significant number of the play’s characters have left office or been discredited, like Tony Blair (Andrew Gillies), Donald Rumfeld (David Fox), George Tenet (Michael Healey), Paul Wolfowitz (Neil Foster), Jacques Chirac (Guy Bannerman), Domenique De Villepin (Paul Essiembre) and Colin Powell (Nigel Shawn Williams). Now what were only surmises about duplicity in the Bush and Blair administrations have become common knowledge. These facts combine to turn a work of daring journalistic theatre into history lesson preaching to the converted.

Yet, even with the thrill value gone, it’s hard not to be impressed with Hare’s insights into the covert workings of government and into the personalities of the work’s major players. Hare doesn’t take the easy path of portraying Bush (Barry Flatman) as an idiot, but rather as someone whose unshakeably faith-based black-and-white view of the world blinds him to nuance or complexity. Flatman physically and vocally gives Bush much more presence than he really has but he does catch the naive folksiness that comprises this limited person’s only claim to charm. Hardee T. Lineham goes rather overboard in making Dick Cheney the epitome of evil. Lineham’s rough outbursts are pretty much the opposite of deathly calm cynicism that makes the real Cheney so scary. On the other hand, Yanna McIntosh is superb at presenting Condoleezza Rice as the most intelligent person in the room, thus rendering her role in the Bush administration all the more enigmatic. Fox is hilariously spot-on as Rumsfeld and Gillies has Blair’s odd mix of saviour and poodle down to a T.

What Hare uses to give shape to what is much like an old chronicle history is his focus on the tragedy of Colin Powell, his loss of face in his own mind and in the world’s esteem as a man of honour. Williams’s gives a great performance, riveting and empassioned. We see the humiliation in him even as he gives Powell’s now derided UN presentation in February 2003 asserting the presence of WMD in Iraq. We see him inwardly sink in shame even when he defends himself afterwards. In Powell’s self-disgust at deluding himself that wrong is right, Hare sees America’s own impending nightmare.

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