Brian Friel Theatre, Belfast festival
“And why? And why? And why do they do this to us?” More than seven years since the bombing of Baghdad, questions around the motivation and legitimacy of the Iraq War still hang heavy in the air. Tearful bewilderment, desperate pleas for help and witness accounts of unimaginable cruelty and suffering resound passionately through the first-hand testimony of Jo Wilding’s Iraq blog, which forms the basis of Paul Hodson’s unusual new play, premiered at the Belfast Festival.
In this spare, fit-up style production, set in a makeshift shelter and jointly delivered by two English companies – the future is unwritten and Fuel – Wilding is reincarnated as J, a trainee lawyer and activist, whose unerring hit on “Smiler in Chief” Tony Blair with a ripe tangerine prompts her to go to Iraq to investigate life there under UN sanctions. Shocked by what she finds, she goes back again – and again.
The first half of this intense piece is delivered in rather dry, semi-documentary style, with J relating the facts and figures as though she were banging them out for her growing constituency of blog readers. While she is there in the thick of things, pounding away at her computer and assembling a collection of clowns to tour squatter camps and orphanages, her brainy sister Mary is rising through the ranks of BBC correspondents, in search of sound bites and human interest stories.
The word pictures J conjures up are powerful and moving, but one longs for, well, a bit of theatre. Thankfully, after the interval it arrives in the shape of the clown show, a little gem of light and laughter. And things turn dramatically complicated when Mary arrives into the Green Zone looking for the big story and then J and her French companion fall dangerously into the wrong hands. When Mary returns to London and publicly commits a professional act of treachery, there is no going back for the sisters and the effects of the conflict wreak havoc in yet another family, on the other side of the world.
Runs until Oct 23rd
