[antiwar-van] 'Madness of George Dubya' a UK hit

[hanna kawas]

'Madness of George Dubya' a UK hit

Wednesday, February 5, 2003 Posted: 8:00 AM EST (1300
GMT)http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/02/05/iraq.britain.play.reut/index.html


Thomas Arnold as George Dubya. Photo: Tristram Kenton

BACKGROUND:
In response to the rising tide of lunatic US/British militarism in the Gulf,
playwright Justin Butcher has decided – like a mad fool – to fling together
an anti-war play in a matter of days, rehearse it in a week and bung it on
in London.

It’s a drop in the ocean, but someone’s got to do something; there’s almost
no opposition being voiced, despite the fact that more than 50% of UK
citizens are opposed to the proposed war.

Britain is being led slavishly into a war for which our Government –
supposedly elected on a manifesto pledge of an “ethical foreign policy” –
has no mandate from its electorate. An estimated 100, 000 Iraqi soldiers
(mostly conscripts) were butchered in the 1991 Gulf War (the infamous
“turkey shoot” on the road to Bas’ra) and anything between 500, 000 and 1,
000, 000 more (including many thousands of children) have died as a result
of the punitive and illegal sanctions imposed by the Western powers since
1991. The British and US air forces have been bombing Iraq on a weekly basis
since 1991.

Despite George Bush Snr.’s pledge to the Arab nations that a just settlement
for the Palestinian people would rise “to the top of the agenda” in return
for their assistance in the 1991 war, the plight of the Palestinians is
worse than ever. Estrangement and hostility between the Muslim world and the
Western world is growing more and more chronic. Britain is now a number one
terrorist target.

And the man most responsible for making matters worse – “President” George
W. Bush – is not even the legally elected leader of his country! He and his
cohorts defrauded, cheated and gerrymandered their way to power and have
been abusing it ever since.

THE PLAY:

Tension is mounting in the Gulf, war drums are beating in Britain and
America, and the commanding general of a US air base in Britain goes “a
little funny in the head” and orders his airborne division, each armed with
countless megatons of nuclear missiles, to attack their primary targets in
Iraq.

It’s a frantic race against time for President George Dubya and Prime
Minister Tony to recall the planes and prevent an all-out war in the Middle
East…

Hot off the press and bang up-to-the-minute, this knockabout farce performed
by a brilliantly talented cast, with live music, is a rollercoaster ride
through the delights and terrors of the eagerly anticipated global war,
coming soon to a town near you!

THE REVIEW

The Madness of George Dubya

Theatro Technis, London

Michael Billington

Thursday January 16, 2003

The Guardian

Thomas Arnold as George Dubya. Photo: Tristram Kenton

 Satire is all but dead on the London stage, so this show by Justin Butcher
deserves the warmest of welcomes. Even if it is largely a topical update of
Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, it had a packed house at this north London fringe
theatre cheering it to the echo.

Butcher's basic idea is very simple: to apply the premise behind Terry
Southern's Strangelove script to a war with Iraq. So we have the crazed head
of a US air base in Britain, who regards UN weapons inspectors as "pinko,
degenerate subversives", launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike against
Saddam Hussein.

While George Dubya cowers in his bunker clutching his teddy bear, panic
ensues in Downing Street. But as the dithering PM finally authorises troops
to break into the American base, the US military relish the prospect of
all-out nuclear war.

In a great line from the film a gung-ho general, confronted by the idea of
20 million nuclear victims, claims: "I don't deny we'll get our hair mussed
a little." You could argue that there are all kind of differences between
the cold war confrontation envisaged by Kubrick and the threatened war
against Iraq.

But what Butcher captures well is the insanity of a situation where, by
making a military strike against terror, we actually increase its
likelihood.

He also goes well beyond his cinematic prototype by giving the Iraqi
ambassador an impassioned speech that charts our dubious relations with his
country from the installation of a puppet regime under King Faisal to our
supply of arms for the war with Iran.

It may underplay Saddam's cruelties but it makes its political point. The
success of the show, however, lies in its creation of a nightmare fantasy
that has a kernel of truth: that sections of the US military establishment
have long been itching for a war with Iraq.

But Butcher's tactic is to push the situation to the limits of absurdity.
Thus the privatised staff at the US air base includes a terrorist tea lady,
dashingly played by Lindsey Ellis, who ultimately holds the world leaders to
ransom.

And, as the world is about to go up in flames, a British general politely
asks the PM if he has had any offers on his Bristol flats.

Butcher's production, climaxing in Tom Lehrer's We'll All Go Together, has a
surprising jauntiness; and, in a large cast, Richard Leaf as the crazed
general obsessed by bodily fluids, Andrew Havill as an ineffectual group
captain, and Nicholas Burns as the vacillating PM stand out.

Even if Butcher's basic narrative is borrowed it shows that satire can still
be an effective weapon in a time of crisis.

· Until February 8. Box office: 020-7387 6617

 _____________________________________________________________________

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- British theatre-goers are flocking to a new
farce which mocks U.S. President George W. Bush as a pyjama-wearing buffoon
cuddling a teddy-bear while his crazed military chiefs order nuclear strikes
on Iraq.

"The Madness of George Dubya" -- which mercilessly satirises British Prime
Minister Tony Blair as well as Bush -- has proved such a success at a fringe
theatre in London that it is moving to a larger venue next week for an
extended run.

"As war comes closer, the mood among audiences has changed," actor Nicholas
Burns, who plays Blair, said after a performance this week. "The audience is
actually laughing more, but the tension behind their laughs has grown.
People are scared."

The play, whose title picks up on the Texan pronunciation of Bush's middle
initial, is the only overtly anti-war play written in Britain during the
Iraq standoff.

It comes, however, against a backdrop of increasing disquiet among UK
intellectuals and artists about London's support for Washington's hawkish
position towards Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Many have been writing
poems and open letters or attending anti-war events.

Director Justin Butcher wrote "The Madness" in three days after Christmas --
then rehearsed it in six -- in a fit of pique against the American
establishment following a brush with some U.S. security agents on a trip to
Romania.

The agents were in Bucharest preparing for an imminent Bush visit and
interrogated Butcher and a friend in a hotel after overhearing a
conversation between them that they said they were "not comfortable with,"
the director said.

"That was a key influence in my feeling that in the arts scene we were in
need of a wakeup call about the influence of American imperialism in the
world," Butcher told Reuters after a full house had again cheered his play
to the rafters.

"This is not a racist, anti-American thing. It's a satirical attack on what
the U.S. and British governments are doing."

As well as echoing in its title a 1994 film, "The Madness of King George,"
about Britain's 18th century King George III, Butcher's satire re-works plot
elements from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic "Dr Strangelove."

Throughout the play, Bush -- with a cowboy hat and Superman T-shirt as well
as his pyjamas -- wanders around uttering an idiot's commentary from the
bunker (or "bunkbed" as he calls it) where his "special guys" have put him
for safekeeping.

"Often times I get confused and forget stuff," he says, as he rails against
the risk from "Islamic tourist states."

"Tourists are brown folks who get on planes and come to America and do bad
things, so we're having a war on tourism," he says in one of various risque
wisecracks in the play.

Enlivened by slapstick song and dances, the play tracks the consequences of
a psychotic, eye-bulging American general's decision to launch preemptive
nuclear strikes on Iraq.

Rubbishing the United Nations as a "bunch of pinko, degenerate subversives"
and Bush and Blair as a "pair of goddamn degenerates," General Kipper puts
the world on the brink of war before an al Qaeda operative disguised as a
cleaner produces the secret code to recall U.S. fighter pilots.

Amid the humour, a dignified speech by the Iraqi ambassador to a panicked
Blair is the seminal political moment of the play. Audience laughter fell to
a hush on a recent night as the actor offered a withering critique of
Western hypocrisy towards Iraq.

While criticising Saddam as a "butcher" -- "We hate him, but we hate you
more," he tells the U.S. and American officials -- he also hails the Iraqi
leader as an "Arab Robin Hood, the only one to give Uncle Sam the finger."

Blair is depicted as a dithering, image-conscious puppet of the Americans,
who cries out for his spin doctor Alastair Campbell -- "Alastair, help
me" -- in moments of need.
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