Also this issue: Niggah, Please! Two black women respond to Carl Singley. -Tarcistah Buetta Maddalay Dray-Mae Deville, Carol D. Tart Letters to the Editor

January 23-29, 2003

loose canon

Theater of War

by Bruce Schimmel

LONDON -- Talk of war with Iraq is everywhere in London, not only in the newspapers and television, but in the world of theater. One of the hottest tickets here is a play called The Madness of George Dubya, or Strangelove Revisited.

References to war, in this city ravaged by war, creep even into the lightest of stage comedies. The actors in The Compleat Works of Wm Shkspr (Abridged) apparently couldn't help improvising a riff on what's being called "Bush's War." Their current reference to the "idiot in the White House" elicited the strongest applause and the most uncomfortable laughter from the audience.

As the cultural and political capital, London is the catalyst for intersections of art and politics that would be surprising, if not inappropriate, for Americans.

In America, we may have the occasional actor who speaks out on issues. But it'd raise eyebrows, if not a few flags, for an American stage and film director of the stature of Peter Brook or an actress like Glenda Jackson to convene a symposium about the impending war, which is what they did last Monday in the Town Hall of the Camden Borough Centre. Camden borough is home to London's West End, the theater district. In New York, this would be like having a rally in the government offices of the borough of Manhattan.

As a political rally, this event was pure English. Eight hundred people stood quietly and politely in line in a drenching rain. Scores were turned away. They came to hear Peter Brook, the celebrated past director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, say something to make sense of a war that many here find incomprehensible.

The event was called "US Revisited: Vietnam Then, Iraq Now." US was a play directed by Brook in 1966. The title, US, is a play on words, referring both to the United States and to "Us," meaning the British. US is credited in part with keeping Britain out of Vietnam.

Few at the symposium seemed to have any illusion that the Brits would escape war this time around, but the question of whether the world of culture could make a difference was still much on their minds.

"Do you think that art can stop war?" was, in fact, the question Brook said the reporter from the BBC had asked him just before the presentation. Clearly for Brook, though, the question was almost rhetorical, as he proclaimed that "that question is absurd."

Absurd or not, it was the reason why hundreds had come tonight. Though one could agree that to stop a war that is ongoing, that hasn't yet begun and that would have no end would be a fine exercise in the theater of the absurd.

Yet not to try, not to attempt to at least block the unstoppable would be for many here unthinkable. If theater can't find a way to take on war, then there's a problem with theater.

And that was a problem that the cultural elite here, tonight, were trying to fix. And so they turned to Brook, the master of the theatrical, for enlightenment.

But if applause indicated anything, Brook's admonition not to ask foolish things of art was less inspiring than ex-actress Glenda Jackson's fiery indignation.

Glenda Jackson is now acting on a broader stage, as a member of Parliament for Britain's most culturally sophisticated district. She too said that she was asked if the people here tonight could make a difference, and her answer was thrilling, though grim.

Grim, because Jackson confirmed that nobody listens to artists and intellectuals. Grimmer still, because even as a member of Parliament, with a right to excoriate Prime Minister Tony Blair in public, she and other anti-war MPs are being ignored.

But thrilling, nonetheless, when she launched into her ringing oratory about the need to keep speaking against the war.

"If anyone thinks that a war in Iraq will reduce international violence, they're crazy," said Jackson, an obvious reference to Dubya's madness that brought the house down.

Truth may be the first casualty of war. But war's "real victim," Jackson told the crowd, "is democracy."

"If you do nothing, nothing changes. But if you do something, something might," she said, ending her remarks to a cheering crowd.

As one older member of the audience reminded me, in the words of Winston Churchill, "It is better to talk, talk, talk than it is to war, war, war."

This was a night of talk, but talk is cheap, life is short and art is long -- and takes a long time to make. And as this war lumbers toward yet more sanitized massacres, it seems that cultural creators haven't enough time to collect their thoughts, much less create something significant and enduring.

The music, the artwork, the performances and theater may have helped stop the war in Vietnam. But there seems little way to stop a war that travels in secret and comes in fits and starts. Both Brook and Jackson seemed keenly aware that events are outstripping our ability to make sense of them.

The important question of the evening, said Brook, is not whether art can affect current events. The real question, said Brook, is, "Can humanity learn from history?"

But as events race past, one war blurring into another, one has to wonder if war is swallowing not only the present, but also the only thing that will make sense of this, our past.

And one has to wonder if the Theater of War is the only cultural legacy humanity is destined to leave.