Stuff Happens: David Hare's history play seems even more incisive after Chilcot

A few hours before the publication of the Chilcot report yesterday, I heard an Iraqi man talking on the radio. He was one of the many who had cheered the fall of Saddam Hussein. Now, 13 years on, he looked back on pre-invasion Iraq with nostalgia. For him and his family, life under a murderous dictator seemed far safer than it did today.

“They came to save us but they had no plans,” says an Iraqi exile, bitterly, at the end of David Hare’s 2004 play Stuff Happens, which was last night given a one-off revival – to mark the publication of the Chilcot report – in a rehearsed reading, directed by Hare, at the Lyttelton theatre. “Iraq has been crucified,” continues the exile. “By Saddam’s sins, by 10 years of sanctions, by the occupation and now the insurgency. Basically it’s the story of a nation that has failed in only one thing. But it’s a big sin. It failed to take charge of itself. And that meant the worse person in the country took charge. A country’s leader is a country’s own fault.”

What does that say about us? Both at that time, under Tony Blair, and now, as our next prime minister is being chosen? And what about in the US, where Donald Trump is a contender for president?

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Those questions hang accusingly in the air throughout this canny piece of programming by the NT – which has become increasingly adept at responding to immediate events, with pieces such as Richard Bean’s Great Britain , about phone-hacking, and Gillian Slovo and Nicholas Kent’s Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State. It’s hard for any theatre, particularly a great beast like the NT, to be nimble and responsive. Good plays take time to cook, and are usually programmed far in advance. If you are heading to Edinburgh this year, it’s unlikely that you will find any Brexit plays – although it may of course be a fruitful area for comedians. So in this instance, rifling through the back catalogue is a productive way of responding to the here and now, and reminding us, as Chris Thorpe has put it, that theatre is “a national laboratory for thinking about … how and what we are”.

Hare originally described Stuff Happens as “a history play”. Some people at the time took that as a sign of bloated Shakespearean ambition, but actually it is perfectly justified, not least for the way that the play charts how political policy can be decided on a whim, or on the back of personal ambitions, without either a glance back or forward. We now know how such policies have played out, not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East, and we can count the costs in the many thousands of deaths, the spread of terrorism and the numbers of refugees and the displaced. History is, as Konrad Adenauer observed, “the sum total of the things that could have been avoided”.

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Much of the same material in Hare’s play is covered in Chilcot, but of course the 2.6m-word report has much greater depth. Back in 2004, some critics and commentators accused Hare of bias in his portrayal of Blair and George W Bush and his account of the diplomatic chess game in the run up to invasion. Actually, Hare seems remarkably even-handed, almost timid. In the damning light of Chilcot, the play looks well researched and insightful. It shows us a Bush – in a masterful performance by Alex Jennings – whose bumbling comic persona disguises steely intent as he manoeuvres towards war under the hawkish eyes of Donald Rumsfeld (Nicholas Woodeson) and Dick Cheney (Corey Johnson), and a fawning Blair (Julian Sands) who sees Iraq as an opportunity to secure his place in the history books.

Blair certainly got that spot in the history books, but not in a way that he can ever have imagined when he unleashed catastrophe with his promise to Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.” It has taken 13 years for the British government’s actions to be fully scrutinised and laid out in public. Stuff certainly does happen, and when it does, Hare’s play reminds us that theatre is one small and crucial way of holding politicians – and ourselves – to account.