Stuff Happens

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In this project, brought to you in collaboration with FQXi, we'll explore the weird and wonderful world of modern physics and what it has to say about the physics of events. With the help of leading experts, we will ponder questions Scene 19: The French make a secret offer to the U.S. that if there are no more resolutions brought up at the UN, then the French will drop their opposition on the war. Powell doesn't think the U.S. should act without talking about it with Blair first. The U.S. then rejects the offer by the French. [2] Julian Sands as Tony Blair in the rehearsed reading of David Hare’s Stuff Happens on 6 July. Photograph: Atri Banerjee

At the Public, the play’s opening moments live up to its promise. One by one, excellent actors step into the roles of our leaders: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Colin Powell. (Gloria Reuben, with an unwavering coif and that indulgent little smile, becomes Condoleezza Rice.) Thanks to Daniel Sullivan’s apt staging—a kind of stadium layout, with the audience on either side of the actors—the show feels like a tribunal: Metaphorically, at least, we will hold our public figures to account.I had uttered more than 1,000 words at that press conference before I said 'stuff happens' but they were the only two words that seemed to matter", he says. Let me emphasize “trying” and “for now” here. As oil trading throughout this geopolitical crisis continues, one should remember former UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s warning: “Events, dear boy, events.”

They are regularly opposed by one of the few genuinely nice people sighted at any point during the three hours. Colin Powell, as the writer is at pains to make clear, is almost unique in that he understands war from the sharp end. He is also both thorough and decent, which ill befits a man in his position. However, the pleasure lies in seeing recent history, in which we all have a stake, enacted on Britain's most prominent public stage. Nicholas Hytner's production is also elegant and unfussy, with the cast seated on stage throughout and emerging, as required, to enact their part in the drama. And, in a vast cast, there are standout performances from Desmond Barrit as an ideologically-driven Cheney, Dermot Crowley as an assertive Rumsfeld, and Adjoa Andoh as an ice-cold Condoleezza Rice. Today most of physics, and almost all of science, is the study of events — things that happen in the world around us. But what exactly are events? It might seem like a silly question, but modern physics casts doubt on many of the concepts we commonly use to define events: the concept of time in which events play out, the idea of cause and effect that links them together, and the idea that Scene 11: Bush believes that since there are new styles of threats since the UN Charter was created, that means there should be new ways of thinking. Powell meets with Bush and says how he believes that if the U.S. goes in to Iraq without the UN then the U.S. will be in trouble. Powell says that invading will make America look like a dictatorship and put our allies in trouble. [2] What went wrong? I sense the slight but unmistakable pressure of a playwright’s thumb upon the political scales. Hare seems unwilling to sympathize with the neocons, who were, after all, the chief architects of the war. Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz is permitted to make his strongest argument (for a revolution in military affairs or the promotion of democracy, respectively) in his own voice. It’s telling that the most resounding defense of the war comes not from one of the historical principals but from an unnamed Angry Journalist, who delivers his speech outside the action and is never heard from again.My favourite tip is to rotate your wardrobe,” she says. “Put away some clothes that you love . . . and when you have that niggle [to shop], go into that bag and it’s like you’ve gone shopping. You get that hit of something ‘fresh’.” If political drama has any purpose at all, it’s to sharpen our minds, upset our prejudices, tax our imaginations—in short, to help keep us out of these messes in the future. But Hare’s mechanical recap doesn’t level that kind of challenge, doesn’t arm us to think more rigorously about the world. It would be nice to think we’ll be just fine without more stories like Antigone debating Creon, Hal fighting Hotspur, or Laura Bush wrestling with her conscience about dead Iraqi children (in the one-act by Tony Kushner that may be, line for line, the best political drama of the Bush years). But the night I saw Stuff Happens, I came home to read that the administration is drawing up its plans for Iran. This shows that no matter the situation and even if Powell had said no the president had already made his decision. It seems in way that Bush is sometimes abusing his power to gain the upper hand of people and not a lot of people would disagree with the President of the United States of America. As for political maneuvering, this is shown as Rumsfeld telling the press indirectly that they don’t need the British and there is also a bit of deception, as he has no sense of regret in his words.

The focus of Hare's play is on what led to war, and far from the delusional mischaracterization of a situation and wishful thinking Rumsfeld offers here, Hare shows that the path to war the jr. Bush administration took was a coldly and carefully calculated one, 'facts' shaped and sold for a single purpose, truth an irrelevancy. Ned's worst fears are confirmed when he ends up in the class with the worst teacher in the school, possibly the world, away from his best mates. Things don't improve when the teacher seems to have adored both Ned's older siblings – how will he survive the day, let alone the whole year? Hare's other key means of creating conflict is to view Colin Powell as a stern realist in a Bush war cabinet made up of deluded fantasists. In a big showdown with Bush, based on documented facts, Powell passionately presses the case for treating war as a last resort after diplomacy has been exhausted. In the play's best line, he points out the hypocrisy of American attitudes. "People keep asking," he says of Saddam, "how do we know he's got weapons of mass destruction? How do we know? Because we've still got the receipts."Carefully researched, and confident that: "Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue", Hare's play certainly feels documentary in character. Stuff Happens had its world premiere at the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre in London on 1 September 2004 [2] and has subsequently been performed at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum (with Keith Carradine and Julian Sands) in June 2005 and at Sydney's Seymour Centre (with Rhys Muldoon and Greg Stone) in July 2005. Greg Stone won a Helpmann Award for Best Male Actor in a Play in 2006.