The night I got back home from the premiere of "Stuff Happens," the BBC World television news led off with a report on a further mess in Iraq -- the chief judge in the trial of deposed president Saddam Hussein had resigned following criticism of his "soft attitude" toward the defendant. I felt strongly that the play by the Tokyo-based Rinkogun company that I saw a few hours before had not been a historical work, but was about something that is very much still happening in real time in Iraq. The curtain has not fallen yet.
"Stuff Happens," by English play and film writer David Hare ("Skylight [1995]," "Amy's View" ['97] and "The Blue Room" ['98]), was originally staged at the National Theatre in London in autumn 2004, where it was directed by Nicholas Hytner, the theater's artistic director. The 3-hour play -- now shortened to 2 1/2 hours -- adopts a docudrama style to show a chain of political events surrounding the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, with the cast mostly playing real politicians from the Bush and Blair administrations. The play introduces a massive amount of information about what might have happened between those top world leaders; speculation as to what may have been going on in their minds at that time; excerpts from their speeches; and scenes based on 58-year-old Hare's "investigation."
The audience is jolted to attention at the start when a loud military marching song accompanied by cheering explodes from the barren, darkened stage. Through a big wooden door in the center, the main characters appear in succession: George W. Bush (Tsunekazu Inokuma), Condoleezza Rice (Atsuko Eguchi) and Donald Rumsfeld (Kenjiro Kawanaka), who delivers an extract from the U.S. defense secretary's infamous comments on the 2003 chaos in Baghdad: "Stuff happens . . . and it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."