Dramatic interventions

War has always triggered the creative urge. With the Iraq conflict, the stage proved the ideal arena for anti-war statements. Aleks Sierz examines a passionate range of responses, from Shakespeare at the National to opera in khaki at Glyndebourne

In 1943, Winston Churchill was persuaded by his wife to go on a rare outing to the West End to see Terence Rattigan's Flare Path, a plucky play about Second World War bomber pilots. Afterward, the cigar-sucking war leader said: "It's a masterpiece of understatement - but we're rather good at that, aren't we?" If, to contemplate the absurd for a moment, you can imagine Tony Blair relaxing at the theatre in the wake of the war on Iraq, what kind of plays would he have seen in the past year?

Well, certainly there was no danger of Blair running into understatement. Scarcely had the gun barrels cooled in Baghdad than Nicholas Hytner's first season as artistic director at the National Theatre began with a modern-dress version of Shakespeare's Henry V. With its combat gear, video screens and spin doctors, it positively screamed with relevance. The soldiers were squaddies, and the stage tableaux, especially the troops crouching behind a jeep, vividly recalled war footage.

Hytner's Henry V felt like a critical response to Laurence Olivier's patriotic 1944 film version - a comparison underlined by the fact that it played on the National's Olivier stage. There, the play's arguments for war sounded as cynical as any loose talk about WMDs, and its war atrocities a pardonable overstatement. Hytner was also helped by the Bard, whose focus on France as Britain's traditional enemy put Jacques Chirac in a long tradition of spoilt dauphins. The theatre was certainly doing its job as a forum for national issues. Hytner says: "That the play seemed during rehearsals to have been written yesterday came as no surprise. It has always seemed to be about a war just finished, a war about to happen, or a war in progress. It seems to us presently to be about a charismatic young British leader who commites his troops to a dangerous foreign invasion for which he has to struggle to find justification in international law."

But he also adds: "It's dangerous to co-opt Shakespeare to a poltical cause. His creativce objectivity and his passionate adherence to the truth make him a lousy propagandist."

If big venues took a while to warm to an anti-war theme, the Artists Against the War were soon on the streets with their agitprop, and London fringe theatres were not far behind. Before the shock-and-awe attack of 20 March, the Latchmere Theatre, in Battersea, south London, staged a double bill of monologues: Frazer Grace's Gifts of War, about the fate of the Trojan women, and Naomi Wallace's The Retreating World, which spoke movingly about the Iraqi dead of the first Gulf war, in 1990-1. Spectators were encouraged to send postcards to Blair, registering their opposition to his plans.

If that show linked pacifist feelings with past atrocities, then Warcrime, David Williams's play about a misdirected cluster bomb, which opened during the onslaught on Iraq, made another reference to Britain's past by being staged in St Andrew's in Holborn, a Wren church that had been gutted by bombs in 1941. Although the play was about mass murder in the Balkans, the bomb-blasted set was eerily reminiscent of events a continent away.

As British and American troops travelled to Iraq, one play made the shorter hop from the fringe to the West End: Justin Butcher's The Madness of George Dubya. Basically a rewrite of Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, it showed how Dubya and Tony Blear (sic) responded to a paranoid US commander unleashing a nuclear holocaust against "Iraqistania". Its vision of a "war against tourism" (try saying it in Bush's voice) was an odd mix of the puerile and the spot-on. Unsurprisingly, Butcher's follow-up was called A Weapons Inspector Calls.

More serious responses appeared by April 2003. The Royal Court Theatre in London staged War Correspondence, a series of events that included plays by Martin Crimp and Rebecca Prichard, poems by Tony Harrison and a documentary piece by Caryl Churchill. Meanwhile, the National Theatre devoted Friday afternoons to a series called Collateral Damage, in which several artists - Judi Dench, Patrick Marber, Tony Harrison and Ralph Steadman - spoke out against the war. British theatre shook off its lethargy and raised its voice in protest.

OK, some reactions seemed opportunistic - the Globe named its 2003 Jacobethan season Regime Change - and others were feeble. For example, Tariq Ali's political satire, The Illustrious Corpse (at Leicester Haymarket) featured a couple of barbs against New Labour but mostly told us what we already knew. Much sharper was Kay Adshead's Animal (Soho Theatre, London), which imaginatively evoked street protest and state brutality, and, later in the year, Richard Bean's The God Botherers (the Bush, London), which boasted a wickedly un-PC attitude to Muslim beliefs.

Last year's Edinburgh Festival was also lit up by political drama. Adriano Shaplin's Pugilist Specialist, performed by San Francisco's Riot Group, was a parable about a unit of marines whose mission was the assassination of an Arab leader nicknamed "the Bearded Lady". The play - which also had an airing on BBC Radio 4 this year - parodied the military's racism, paranoia and macho posturing. Joining those dissident Americans was the Australian Vanessa Badham, whose play Capital depicted a pair of spin doctors trying to put the best gloss on an al-Jazeera video of US marines enjoying a kill-and-rape spree in an Iraq hospital.

Despite the widespread welter of protest, it took a while to hear the voices of the Iraqi people. Enter an Iraqi-American, Heather Raffo, who explored the lives and loves of women under Saddam Hussein's regime in her Edinburgh monologue Nine Parts of Desire (which also visited the Bush). And guess what? She gave the clichés of submissive Arab womanhood a loud slap in the face.

While Raffo's play was based on personal research, the drama-doc got a boost from Richard Norton-Taylor's condensed version of the Hutton inquiry. Called Justifying War and put on by the Tricycle Theatre, in north London, months before Hutton had even finished his report, it was a fine parade of the usual suspects, from Geoff Hoon to Alastair Campbell. Since Norton-Taylor used the participants' own words, the result was a banquet's worth of forked tongues.

Rich though the anti-war harvest was, events in Iraq affected theatre even when they weren't being written about explicitly. Two Scottish playwrights set the trend. Gregory Burke's play about the Falklands war, The Straits, seemed to acquire a wider resonance because it dealt with Britain's imperial pretensions, and Henry Adams's The People Next Door got louder laughs because its domestic farce featured a suspect Muslim terrorist. Two major anti-war classics were revived to good effect last year: John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance toured the country, and R C Sherriff's Journey's End, about the First World War, dug in for the duration at a West End address. Both felt much more relevant, though neither was about a situation remotely like the invasion of Iraq. That's the power of metaphor.

Even opera caught the anti-war bug. At Glyndebourne in the hot summer of 2003, the bad-boy director Peter Sellars caused a stir by dressing Mozart's Idomeneo in combat fatigues and Iraqi veils, and the composer Keith Burstein wrote Manifest Destiny, a new work about Leila, a young Muslim poet studying in Britain, who is seduced by violent terrorism and then incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. Yes, it's Al-Qa'ida: The Opera. But although it is clear that British theatre did respond rapidly to the war in Iraq, it is also true that none of the examples cited was outstanding enough to win an award. Last year, the big gong-scoopers were plays such as Michael Frayn's Democracy (about politics in 1970s West Germany) and Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman (about murder in Eastern Europe). Worse, the National's smash hit Jerry Springer: The Opera seemed to exalt US culture rather than attack it. And that theatre's fine marathon, Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, was about the aftermath of a different conflict - the American Civil War.

If theatre can't compete with film in showing the visceral horror of war - as in the ghastly D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan - what it can do is air radical ideas that are too passionately biased to get a look-in in the mainstream media. Theatre's other strength is that it can use metaphor and language to open up its audiences' minds, as in Martin Crimp's richly allusive Advice to Iraqi Women, at the Royal Court (see right).

So it's good that an art form so often dismissed as irrelevant made a point last year of rediscovering its essential "nowness". The National Theatre is now developing David Hare's Stuff Happens, a new look at the US's obsession with toppling Saddam Hussein, which takes its title from Donald Rumsfeld's throwaway line about the looting of Baghdad.