Thousands of dramatizable moments have poured out of the chaos of the Iraq war. British playwright David Hare's attention, however, has been focused on one seemingly small, but important subplot of the conflict: the intellectual civil war it sparked in liberal circles.
While most on the left reflexively rejected U.S. President George W. Bush's call to war in 2003, an influential group of liberals, including the likes of academic (and now Liberal Party leader) Michael Ignatieff and journalist Christopher Hitchens found themselves the unlikely allies – some would say dupes – of pro-war neoconservatives in the lead-up to the invasion. And it's been reported that one of Hare's characters is Ignatieff in drag.
“I'm interested in those people who, for reasons mostly to do with the former Yugoslavia, came to believe, as indeed my Prime Minister Tony Blair did, in humane intervention,” says Hare, 61, over the phone from London.
Hare is England's and possibly the Western world's most prominent politically minded playwright, whose list of past hits include Plenty, The Blue Room and Amy's View. (In his free time, he pens the occasional film script, like his Golden Globe-nominated screenplay for The Reader.) The prolific playwright has experienced waves of popularity on this side of the Atlantic, the latest arising from two successful plays he has written about Iraq – a subject that seems to have stymied most filmmakers.
The first, 2004's Stuff Happens, was a near-Shakespearean account – “one-third transcribed, two-thirds fiction” – of the buildup to the war. It concerned those at the levers of power: Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, former British prime minister Tony Blair and former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell. In Hare's version of events, liberal interventionists like Blair co-operated with the Iraq plan in good faith only to find that they had no significant input later on. (As Hare summarizes, Stuff Happens is about “a supposedly stupid man triumphing over a supposedly clever man.”)
Hare's second Iraq play, 2006's The Vertical Hour, which opens next week at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg, covers similar territory in a more personal milieu. The main character is a well-known left-leaning interventionist, Nadia Blye (played by Amy Rutherford), who shaped her views as a war correspondent in the Balkans and now teaches political science at Yale. On a trip to England, she clashes with her fiancé's father, Oliver Lucas (Shaw festival veteran Norman Browning), a reclusive doctor who believes Nadia allowed herself to be co-opted by an illiberal cause.
If Nadia's credentials sound familiar, they are awfully similar to those of Liberal leader Ignatieff, who prior to entering politics reported from Bosnia and Kosovo and held a position as a professor of human rights at Harvard. When The Vertical Hour had its British premiere in 2008, the Sunday Times writer A.A. Gill revealed that Ignatieff – “the long navel-gazer who, even for a Canadian, has had a conspicuous humour bypass” – was the character's inspiration.
Hare calls that a “complete misconception,” but admits that Nadia's way of defending her political positions was influenced by how Ignatieff and others in what was dubbed the “I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk club” framed their arguments in support of the war. (Ignatieff has since recanted these views.) “I'd been very struck when I'd heard Michael Ignatieff speak, that he had this tone of injured self-pity,” says Hare. “In front of audiences, he presented himself as somebody who had suffered terribly for his views.”
Since Stuff Happens, which played in Vancouver and Toronto last year, coverage of Hare's work has expanded from the arts pages of British newspapers to the politics section. Columnists, assuming that Hare has continued writing in a semi-documentary vein, particularly enjoy speculating on who the characters in his plays are meant to represent.
