Howard Davies has done some truly remarkable things at the National, most recently with a trio of classic Russian plays/adaptations (Philistines, Burnt by the Sun, The White Guard) that received almost universal acclaim. All three had epic, remarkable Realist settings and the latter two centred on the theme of war and its impact on ordinary people and their families.
His latest offering, a new play by JT Rogers, deals with the same theme much more explicitly, with a contemporary subject matter whose consequences still appear on seven o’clock news headlines on a weekly basis. Spanning the course of a decade, it chronicles the development of US involvement in the Afghan war under the Regan administration, which sees the demise of Soviet control over the country and the eventual rise of Islamic Fundamentalism in Afghanistan. It is, in short, a contemporary epic play.
And thus it was only natural that Davies should be directing it: in many ways, it is a real spiritual child of those Russian writers, from Tolstoy to Bulgakov, who knew how to distil the stories of most complex and traumatic chapters of human history, poetically yet precisely, by zooming in to the ordinary human beings who are inadvertently sucked into the vortex of these massive conflicts and battles, and whose every decision could eventually lead to much bigger consequences than they could have imagined.
The protagonist of Blood and Gifts, James Warnock, is a CIA agent whose first encounter upon arriving in Pakistan is a KGB agent Gromov, who unsurprisingly is well appraised of every agonising detail of Warnock’s previous assignment, in Tehran, and especially of the context of his exit there. Despite their ‘strategic positions’, the two men establish a tacit, human rapport and one of the final scenes (but not THE final scene – this is reserved for the much less melancholy cadence) sees the two of them parting at the same airport terminal, in the shadow of the fast-crumbling USSR. Warnock, (according to the programme notes) loosely based on real-life CIA Station Chief in Pakistan, Howard Hart, is almost a cliché of an American agent who has appeared in thousands of Hollywood films: charismatic, intellectual (by the end of the play, you gather he speaks fluent Farsi, Russian and Arabic – some peoples’ talents can be so irritating), personable, a good colleague and a devoted (albeit often absent) husband. But most importantly, he embodies that brand of naïve idealism, with the unshakable belief in the intention and capability of his great country to ‘do good in the world’, that we now invariably associate with these front-line American field-workers (‘This is a strategic war, NOT a religious war,’ he proclaims righteously). This idealist sense of mission drives him throughout his on-off presence in Afghanistan during the ten years although, for the most part, he’s not even allowed to set foot on its soil, having to resort to operating first through a slithery Pakistani colonel, then his friend and partner-in-war, a battered Afghan war lord. There are dark times in his personal life that he has to endure, sacrifices that he ultimately deems worthy for the greater cause of what he and his colleagues are defending. Only in the very last moments of the play is his idealism relentlessly shattered in a setting of peace and calmness that he has fought so hard to achieve.
In any lesser hands, Warnock would have been a Clooney-lite caricature of a character. Not so as written by Rogers and acted with such moving conviction by Lloyd Owen here. That’s because there’s a very fine line between clichés – which exist for a very good reason – and caricatures, and Rogers knows exactly where to stop. His portrayal of Warnock’s various associates – the KGB worker (Matthew Marsh), the MI6 worker who is forever frustrated by ‘the cheapness of Her Majesty’ and worn out by cynicism already at the outset of the action (Adam James); the Pakistani Colonel and his excruciatingly sycophantic side-kick; the Afghan warlord and his right-hand-man who is obsessed with Western popular culture (Phillip Arditti, whose surreal fixation on pop songs and film stars provide some of the best comical moments of the evening); the boss at CIA with his own brand of cynicism because he’s seen it all (Simon Kunz) – are similarly spot-on without being presented as mere stereotypes. Rogers has accomplished the one crucial task to lift them beyond such: he makes us care about what happens to these people. Each of them has a glint in his eye, for they all know that they have a very specific place in this vast historic canvas of global warfare, and any slightest disturbance to the delicate balance of things could tip it all over and turn their lives upside down. Blood is shed, gifts are given, but only so that more blood shall be shed, and, as with all wars, there appears to be no real winner and no one ends up any the wiser.
Having seen Davies’s Russian plays, I had expected a realistic set again, perhaps with painstaking details portraying the craggy mountains of Afghanistan (where, lest we forget, Osama Bin Laden is still purported to be hiding) and 1980s-tyle CIA offices. But here’s the other twist: the stage design (by Ultz) is abstract almost to the point of minimalism, with container-like compartments cleverly sliding out of, into, and alongside each other, accentuated only by the bare essential of props to indicate the location of each scene. The rest is left to the sound and lighting designs (also notable) and, well, our imagination. To me, this was a good call, for the dialogue and actions on stage were rather gripping enough and we didn’t really need any other multi-layered background, visual or otherwise, to distract us. The bare setting of the ending also added to the immediacy of its poignancy: these are real people, and it is now. Just like Warnock, whether we intended to or not, we have all been drawn into it somehow.
