Janie Dee, the popular London actress, is weeping — not clichéd stage sobs but real tears. She is crying at the thought of Iraqi children living in the shadow of war. "I keep coming back to the picture on my wall of two Iraqi kids hugging each other," she says. "These children are flesh and blood and we have to do something." By "we," Dee means the British theater community. Boisterously antiwar, its members are trying to make sure the world knows how they feel.
To that end, Dee is organizing a Concert for Peace at London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on March 23. Dame Judi Dench will reprise one of her most famous stage roles, singing the title-song from Cabaret. Harold Pinter has written two poems and Alan Ayckbourn has written a song. Dee says she periodically wakes up in the night wondering if, after all, war is the right solution. "But this isn't political," she concludes, "it's emotional. We're saying to the Iraqis and our own government that we should all be humane. Surely war can be replaced by something more creative?"
Well, perhaps. But while artists have been spouting political opinions for centuries, it's difficult to bend art to serve a pro- or antiwar message. Dench's number, for example, comes from a show which, the pro-war faction might argue, is about the dangers of doing nothing. But never mind — as Dee says, this is an emotional celebration of life. And in addition to her concert, the new crop of highly topical productions being staged in London right now means that this season the phrase "theater of war" has taken on an entirely new meaning.
In Collateral Damage, a new weekly cabaret season at the National Theatre, artists such as Dench, Jude Law and Vanessa Redgrave will perform pieces commenting on the crisis. "I and Lindsay Duncan are reading Thucydides' account of ancient Athens' war on Melos," says the series' founder, actor Corin Redgrave. "As in the case of Iraq, Melos was a small, wonderful place compared to the mighty Athens. Also culturally superior."
"It became very moving for all of us. It allowed us to discover our common spirit"
Some of his colleagues are more moderate. The series' director, Roger Michell, insists that he is neither a pacifist nor anti-American. "We're only saying that we don't think war is appropriate at this moment."
At Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, artistic director Mark Rylance opposes war with Iraq, but says he wants to keep personal opinions off his stage. "Why should my opinion be more important than anyone else's? Let the audience draw ideas from the work." His "Season of Regime Change" will feature Elizabethan plays that deal with violent shifts in power — among them Shakespeare's Richard II and Richard III and Marlowe's Edward II. Such classics can be spun to fit many different political views. Is Richard III about the necessary destruction of a bloody tyrant — or a self-perpetuating cycle of violence?
Others have reached even further back into the canon to argue against the cannons. In a peace protest on March 3, over 1,000 actors in 59 countries, from Argentina to Thailand, performed Aristophanes' antiwar play Lysistrata on the same day. In Patras, Greece, university students took the play to a tent in an abandoned building where the city's Kurdish refugees live. Having fled Saddam's tyranny, they disagreed with the pacifist message but, says production director Panos Kouros, still found ways to communicate: "It became very moving for all of us. It allowed us to discover our common spirit."
Back in London, more than three hundred Lysistrata actors gathered at Parliament Square, at one point wearing gags meant to symbolize the British government's alleged wish to silence them. They should count their blessings. British artists are free to speak, declaim, chant, sing and dance whatever they please. Which is more than actors in Iraq are allowed to do. What has been the biggest hit show in Baghdad in recent years? Zabibah and the King, the musical version of a self-glorifying tale by an acclaimed (in Iraq) author, one S. Hussein.
