Reviews for Stuff Happens

The average rating for Stuff Happens based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-10-06 00:00:00 Steve Strong Robert Fisk, commenting on Colin Powell's appearance at the February 2003 UN Security Council Meeting, said that Powell seemed quite unsure of himself, halting and unconvincing, as he delivered his now infamous fairytale justifying the US's subsequent invasion of Iraq. Conversely, Fisk noted, when he saw David Hare's Stuff Happens in New York, three years later, the Powell on stage was much more forceful, more charismatic, and a good deal more sure of himself. I mention Powell, because Hare has maintained that - though much of this play (everything 'behind closed doors') is fabulation - in the interim between the premiere in London in 2004, and the revival in New York in 2006, he changed only one thing - the degree to which Colin Powell was or wasn't complicit in the events that lead up to the invasion. Evidently, people who been involved, or had scrutinized the events closely, accused him of over lenience in his treatment of Powell, so he, in his own words, 'changed him [Powell:] from a liberal hero to a tragic hero.' Calling Colin Powell a liberal hero is a contention I don't here wish to go into - the dramatic connotations of 'tragic hero,' however, are far more interesting. From Aeschylus to Miller we all seem to have our own interpretations of what is meant by tragic hero, and the last quoted - Miller's 'Chickens coming home to roost' seems the most applicable. Hare's depiction of Powell - most of which is in fact not taken from documentary sources - sees him as something of a serial worrier, an industrious and occasionally naïve apologist who nonetheless rattles his saber from time to time, when he believes he can get away with it. His dramatic purpose - chasing wild geese in a White House of silently leering cronies, each more in-the-know than he could ever hope to be - is rendered ultimately pointless with he utters a fateful 'I don't disagree' to Bush's eventual admission that he intends to wage war - second UN resolution or none. Powell, then, is hardly Othello, but we can perhaps see him more in the light of the doomed salesman Willy Loman, grafting and whimpering in the outmoded grooves of his little existence. Where Loman was incapable of looking up and seeing the societal developments that would render him extinct, however, we get the feeling the Powell may well have known all along, and not looked up simply from cowardice. Tragic hero? It's an interesting interpretation, though not altogether convincing. In a way, approaching this play through anything other than a character by character basis seems impossible - as an audience member we bring to an interpretation of this text so many perspectives and so much bias based on what we do or don't know, where we do or don't stand, that the play-as-a-whole is more a (bomb?) site of innumerable derivations and contradictory assertions than it is a narrative. We would have had to have been sitting in some proverbial cave for years in order for it not to be, and Hare's play is certainly not written to educate the uninitiated; though it does take pleasure in throwing in the odd snippet or two of little known 'information' to back up its avowedly left-leaning and unashamedly biased opinions. That last was not an insult, or an attempt to debunk - I do not personally believe that any writing, however hard it may strive, is capable of obtaining complete objectivity, and I am more scared of writers or writings that falsely claim such a thing than I am of polemicists who wear their influences and opinions publically. Hare himself has said that he does not know what verbatim theatre is - a google or Wikipedia search for this term will reveal some or other definitions claiming a prevalence of documentary research, one might turn up Max Stafford-Clark's oft repeated adage that it's 'like serving up your research raw - like a steak tartar.' Hare's confusion sprung from watching Stoppard's 'Coast of Utopia' and taking personal objection to an extreme viewpoint held by an onstage character that he believed to be mirroring some obnoxious opinion of the writer's own, before he found out that Stoppard had lifted the speech from the direct sayings of the historical character he was there representing. Hence - is 'Coast of Utopia' verbatim? With 'Stuff Happens', there is so much on stage that simply cannot have been available to the writer - private conversations between the heads of state of six or seven countries, phone calls, classified information etc that common sense (should, at least) tells us that what we are watching is not a so-called objective assessment of things-as-they-happened but rather a subjective perspective on events as they are/were presented. Again, I have no problem with this, and am much more comfortable with an honest liar than I am with someone who writes history and calls it 'fact.' So much of history is unknowable, and so much of the representation of history is affected directly by issues of interpretation, de facto narrativising of unrelated events, spatial and temporal dislocation of items under analysis and so on that the old objectivity has been the subject of a fervent historicist debate for decades, now, with an increasing number of historians prophesying the death of history in both the upper-case (metanarratives, such as Capitalism or Marxism) and lower-case (history-as-toil, the work of historians). Hare's writing is, regardless of what issue one may take with it - and there is a lot here to take issue with, whatever your political leanings - nevertheless a vitally honest reaction to such assertions; a dishonestly personal reaction to events that have become so important to so many of us that their original meaning is now impossible to grasp. Ethically, of course, the collapse of such high-minded principles guiding the 'objectivity' of history is a problem - Stuff Happens' trump card is that it plays in an arena where dishonesty and disloyalty have clouded the view for so long that they are impossible to extricate. The counter argument would of course run to the effect that this makes it all the more vital to discover What Actually Happened. To which the answer, reasonably enough, is that people will continue to try (and sometimes succeed) to discover this - they will work hard, they will establish the facts as they go along, and then they will present their findings. And then they will realize that their findings are in direct contradiction to other people who have done the exact same thing. In the meantime, we have texts like Stuff Happens - which, whether liked or disliked, will retain, I believe, the power and ability to provoke debate whenever it is revived, read or discussed. And whilst this in itself is to a large part contingent upon the vivid nature of its subject matter, it's still an important role - one of art's best, and something a lot of people would do well to remember.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-20 00:00:00 Steve Smith I do remember the events surrounding the invasion of Iraq and Hare's play is a damning indictment of the players, from the breathtaking arrogance of Bush, to Blair's weakness and Colin Powell's grave misgivings about the whole undertaking. Whilst this play is a dramatisation of real events, and private conversations are necessarily fiction, it is clear that Hare believes Bush was going to wage war on Iraq whatever the evidence (or lack of it) regarding WMD. Actually, the play says far more about Hare's politics and take on events than it does about the events themselves. This is not a very exciting play to read; it lacks dramatic tension on the page. It may be better to see it in performance.