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The two other hot London items are more corrosive still about the U.K.'s uncouth cousins across the pond. The plays skirt libel; indeed, they miniskirt it. I can't say I was personally offended — I love to hate Americans' brash idiocies as much as the Brits. Still... I wonder if this would fit on the front of a T shirt: "I went to London and all I saw were shows about lousy Americans."
SATIRES AND STRIPES FOREVER
The President of the United States enters (in a Superman costume, holding a teddy bear) to the strains of the "Star Spangled Banner" and exits, two absurdist hours later, to "God Bless America." In between, the Arts Theatre is rife with farce and libel.
"The Madness of George Dubya" has a premise meant to titillate Lefties on either edge of the Atlantic. A satire of the new American monarchy, it imagines George W. Bush as the idiot dauphin who has ascended to the throne and now stumbles into inventing an unjust war against a nonthreatening foe. An extra inducement — given that "Dubya" was first staged last summer, and that each week before, during and after the Iraq War has introduced new evidence of the Bush Adminstration's naivete and perfidy — is that the play, as its producers state, "is kept bang-up-to-the-minute with daily re-writes churned out at a furious pace by the writer Justin Butcher."
Gee. Aristophanes mixed with "The Daily Show." For theater lovers and Bush haters, this is swell. Alas, the play isn't. The production and performances have a broad, ragged tone; it's amateur night in Blighty.
Though the title of the play echoes Alan Bennett's historical comedy "The Madness of George III" (known in the U.S. as "The Madness of King George"), Butcher's direct inspiration is Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Cold War farce "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Much, much of the film's dialogue is repeated verbatim. The film's Air Force base venue moved from the U.S. to Britain. The characters' names get only the mildest makeovers: Gen. Ripper to Gen. Kipper, Buck Turgidson to Chuck Gorgidson, Group Capt. Mandrake to Windbreaker. No question that the clever screenplay by Peter George, Terry Southern and Kubrick might be smartly tweaked to reflect later anxieties. ("Dubya" has one such twist: the Group Capt., who originally had been tortured by the Nazis in WWII, has here been mistreated by the Argentines during the more benign Falklands conflict.) But the play drags on, and drags down the original.
Still, it's bracing to see somebody, in some field of the arts, bring a little asperity to the events leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq....
WE INTERRUPT THIS THEATER REVIEW FOR A POLITICAL RANT
That's right, folks, another assault from the left-wing New York media — me. (I don't have a lot of company.) But even movie critics and professional nostalgiacs watch the news, have opinions, nurture passions and grudges. I had them in September 2001, when I wrote in this space: "We dwelt in what may seem an Eden of innocence. Or was it ignorance to think we were immune to attack? ... Now we awake to the nightmare that tens of millions of faraway innocents live every moment. September 11 was the day we joined the rest of the world. The real world." The events that followed — events devised and executed by the U.S. this time — persuade me we haven't learned from the obvious lessons of history.
For Americans, tragedy used to be what happened to other people. It was a story that ran deep inside the first section of the New York Times, it described misfortunes befalling people not within our sphere of influence (or interest) and — well, frankly, we were too fat and happy to care.
Sept. 11 changed that, but not in a healthy or therapeutic way. Tragedy was now something that happened only to us. Instead of forging a bond with other, more long-suffering victims of genocide in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda and too many other spots on the globe, the attack isolated Americans. It pricked the bubble of our invulnerability and made us feel uniquely vulnerable one moment, righteously pugnacious the next. It also afforded us the luxury available to a superpower but not to the rest of oppressed humanity: military vengeance.
In America before the war, far too many commentators — and virtually all Democratic politicians — were cowed by the mass of misinformation the Bush-Dick-Colin crowd shoveled out about Iraq's supposed arms stash. I except, always, "The Daily Show with John Stewart," which bravely hoisted the flag of progressive skepticism four nights a week. It and BBC World Service became the two most reliable news services available before and during the War.
Those of us on the American left saw that Bush's boys cooked up war fever against Iraq because they were frustrated at being unable to find Osama bin Laden. Well, they could find Saddam, and they could destroy him. They were like a man who gets his ego busted all day at the office, then comes home and kicks the dog. Saddam was the dog who could be kicked out. That's why they cunningly confused, in their preemptive pitch to the American people, Saddam's secular thugs in Baghdad with Osama's religious terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Bush wanted to prove America was still the big dog, and Iraq was our chew toy. Indeed, the lunatic profligacy of the enterprise — its needlessness, its expense in lives, money and reputation — was for them the best argument in its favor. The Iraq attack proved we could do ... anything. We weren't the world's sheriff any more; we were the mean hombre who spits tobacco juice in the eye of international law.
Last October, the two sides in the conflict laid out their positions. Tariq Aziz, interviewed on "60 Minutes," told Mike Wallace that Iraq had no nuclear or chemical weapons, but that he feared war was inevitable. Colin Powell, a few days later, told the U.N. he had evidence that Iraq had the means to attack the U.S. Watching the two presentations, I remember feeling creepy that I believed Iraq's pitchman but not America's. Now we know: Aziz (and thus Saddam) told the truth; Powell (and thus Bush) didn't.
Being validated by history gives us peaceniks little comfort. We didn't stop our country from doing to Iraq what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor: strike at a country on the other side of the world because of a paranoid delusion that it might some day attack us. I guess the left does have the luxury of gloating. (Even the Democrats are developing a spine, eight months too late, suddenly remembering they're the opposition party and raising questions about the Bush-whacking they fell for last fall.) But we'll settle for mocking the people who got the U.S. into this mess and who continue to sink into it as their rationalizations are exposed.
So we'll lap up the progressive satire available four nights a week on "The Daily Show." (This Thursday's deconstruction of the Bush press conference was brilliant. High point: Bush's blaming of the tepid U.S. economy on TV news producers who shook consumer confidence by blaring the phrase "March to War!" from last summer to this spring, thus; and Stewart's observation: "Yeah, why were they doing that? I mean, it's not like some asshole was marching us to war.") And we'll cheer on the idea, if not the reality, of an anti-Bush burlesque like "The Madness of George Dubya."
And with that, back to our review...
DUBYA JEOPARDY
Most English parodies of Americans have a raw edge. We're seen as big, loud and clumsy, and our political and economic power makes our heavy footfalls the topic of fear as well as derision; we can crush other nations without trying, or caring. George W. Bush, under the cartoonist's brush, acquires the malaproperties of Eisenhower, the clumsiness of Gerald Ford, the homey vagueness of Ronald Reagan, the open-faced idiocy of Dan Quayle. (Republican statesmen have screwed up the language and the world. Democrats, like F.D.R., Kennedy and Clinton, just screwed — a priapic predilection that endeared them to Europeans and infuriated many Americans.)