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Spirit of Afghanistan laid bare
GREAT GAME: ENDURING FREEDOM
Tricycle Theatre
AN EXHAUSTED sigh and a declaration that the place is an unsalvageable wreck are common responses to the trajectory of Afghanistan’s recent history.
This hard, mountainous land was sold down the river by imperialists, ground down by war, taken hostage by thugs (who did at least bring a degree of stability), then wracked again by war.
But events are only interesting in terms of the questions they raise. Great theatre is not built of unambiguous chronologies and staid facts but of emotion.
So it was that I found myself glancing at my watch during the first pair of plays that make up Enduring Freedom (Ben Ockrent’s Honey and Abi Morgan’s The Night is Darkest Before the Dawn), but wholly captivated by the second (Richard Bean’s On the Side of the Angels and Simon Stephens’s Canopy of Stars).
Enduring Freedom is part of a season of short plays about Afghanistan, which, taken together, come under the heading Great Game. These short plays have been organised into three compilations, which can be viewed back to back, should you wish, or separately (and not necessarily in
numerical order).
This big, complex, political enterprise is the kind of project that marks the Tricycle out from its “play-it-safe” competitors.
One flaw is the conspicuous absence of Afghan names from the roll-call of playwrights involved. Of the plays in the Enduring Freedom compilation, Bean’s and Stephens’s worked best because they focused on British people rather than Afghans. In Bean’s play we meet a morally compromised aid worker forced to choose the “least worst” of a bunch of bad options as she struggles to resolve a land dispute. Canopy, meanwhile, is an unsentimental but sympathetic peek into the life of a British soldier at home in the UK and on tour in Afghanistan.
The contrast could not be greater between these mischievous little gems and the other two plays in the compilation, one a pedestrian reconstruction of the trials of an anti-Taliban politician, the other a depiction of the harsh lives of Afghan villagers. One dimensional characters – grieving wife, brutal warlord – stymie these offerings, which wear their research so much on their sleeves one wonders if it might not have been better to dispense with the dramatisation and read the audience the relevant Wikipedia page instead.
But if one need only sit through two decent (if strictly informative) pieces about Afghanistan to get to enjoy two plays as sharp and surprising as Angels and Canopy, it would seem churlish to complain.
All credit to the Tricycle for staging such a comprehensive programme at a time when the Obama administration is focusing afresh on Afghanistan as its neighbour, Pakistan, struggles to contain the Taliban.
Until June 14
0207 328 1000 |
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