Smash hit

I suppose my reason for writing it was outrage, but I know how easily outrage put on the stage can turn into the didactic, so I cast around for a theatrical form that would be appropriate to the subject and a little to my surprise discovered that I wanted it to be a musical, or if not exactly a musical, then something within a musical and vaudevillian tradition.

My great stroke of luck was to discover that the composer Richard Blackford, equally appalled by the war, was also wanting to write about the events that have dominated the world since 9/11. The result of our collaboration is Follow My Leader, a satirical musical that engages with the new world order imposed upon us by Bush and Blair, but focusing mainly on the Iraq war.

As directed by Mark Clements, the show unashamedly uses popular theatrical forms to explore serious issues. This seems to me entirely appropriate. We live in a Punch and Judy world, where big, bad Colonel Gaddafi is now our friend and our old friend Saddam Hussein is in a prison cell. In fact, no theatrical grotesque is quite up to the reality. How does one make sense of the war in Afghanistan? First we supported the Mujahidin because they fought against the Russians, then we used the Northern Alliance to overthrow them, conveniently failing to notice the Northern Alliance’s habit of killing its prisoners by mass suffocation.

Received wisdom dictates that satire is what closes on Saturday, but as I found when I wrote (the Blair spin satire) Feelgood, there is a healthy public hunger for shows that deal with big issues but also make you laugh. The most common question asked of satire is: “Does it change anything?” and I suppose the honest answer is, nobody knows. But even if minds are not changed, I think satire can give people heart, validate their sense of outrage, and remind them that nice, decent family men like Blair are capable of taking decisions that lead to the deaths of thousands.

It seems to me likely that Blair relishes his role as war leader. His tone is increasingly Churchillian, his language increasingly biblical. Clothed in the shining armour of his faith, he leads us into battle. Act I of Follow My Leader finishes with Bush and Blair on their knees, sweetly singing, “We’re sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus”.

Some may take offence, though I hope not, because it is not religion that is being attacked here, it is the hijacking of religion for the purposes of war.

More broadly, some may argue that a comedy about war is in bad taste. To which I would reply, no, not true. It is war that is in bad taste.

• Follow My Leader runs at the Birmingham Rep (0121 236 4455), until April 10 and at Hampstead Theatre, London (020-7722 9301) from April 21 to May 15

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  IT’S NOT, one imagines, a good time for Tony Blair and George Bush to snatch a relaxing night-out at the theatre. The Iraq conflict has inspired a wave of anti-war productions that continues with Alistair Beaton’s Follow My Leader.

  In May the Tricycle Theatre follows its Hutton inquiry play, Justifying War, with Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, based on verbatim material from the families of detainees, lawyers and government spokesmen. And the National Theatre is developing David Hare’s Stuff Happens, about the US’s obsession with toppling Saddam Hussein.

  On Broadway, Tim Robbins’s agit-prop revue Embedded is satirising the Bush Administration’s methods and manners in mounting the invasion of Iraq. The Riot Group from San Francisco has been touring Britain with Adriano Shaplin’s Pugilist Specialist, about a group of soldiers sent to assassinate a foreign leader.

  They follow a busy 2003 for plays engaging with or responding to the war. Nicholas Hytner’s version of Shakespeare’s Henry V gave us squaddies, video screens and spin doctors. Even Glyndebourne had an Idomeneo from Peter Sellars with combat fatigues and Iraqi veils.

  Justin Butcher reworked the Cold War paranoia of Dr Strangelove for The Madness of George Dubya, with a US commander launching a nuclear attack on “Iraqistania”. In keeping with its scattershot, farcical tone, Butcher’s follow-up was called A Weapons Inspector Calls.

  Many theatre companies chose to revive anti-war plays. The Orange Tree in Richmond, Surrey, put on John Galsworthy’s The Mob (1914), about a government minister who refuses to back an imperialistic war. The Pleasance in London mounted a series of German and English anti-war plays alongside ticketed debates about theatre and war.

  After a long absence from the stage, John Arden’s Sgt Musgrave’s Dance was staged last year by the Oxford Theatre Company. A group of soldiers led by Musgrave are shown returning home determined to turn their guns on the rich and powerful who waged an imperial war.

  The voices of the Iraqi people were eventually heard in last year’s Edinburgh Festival monologue Nine Parts of Desire by the Iraqi-American Heather Raffo. In detailing the brutal oppression of Iraqi women, it raised a difficult question, especially for those opposed to the war: what should the West have done about Iraq? The conflict also added resonance to such dramas as Gregory Burke’s The Straits, set against the Falklands conflict, and Henry Adams’s The People Next Door, a domestic farce involving a suspect Muslim terrorist.

  Even now, the current West End revival of R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, set among soldiers in the First World War trenches, has an added poignancy in making audiences wonder what today’s troops are feeling in Basra and Baghdad.

  IAN JOHNS