Output details

Stovepipe

Research content/process:

I wanted to examine the motives of men who put themselves in jeopardy, but I was daunted by the difficulty of putting acts of warfare on stage, and by my lack of first-hand military experience. Previous British plays about the Iraq war have usually been set in Britain and almost always amongst Western characters. I decided to take an oblique route: researching the largely unreported role of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in modern warfare.

I spent several weeks in Amman, and on Jordan’s ‘soft’ border with Iraq interviewing Iraqi refugees, PMCs, and British and American soldiers. Staying in the cheapest hotel I could find – Hotel Baghdad – I spent days walking around, checking out the preparations for the ‘Rebuild Iraq’ conference – a rather gaudy trade fair at which some of the play is set. At night I would go to the bars of the 5* hotels where the ‘mercs’ (PMCs) drank. Eventually I managed to befriend some British and Canadian PMCs. Together, we visited Amman’s western bars, Russian-run brothels, and Egyptian-run underground casinos.

The resulting play, Stovepipe, immerses its audiences in the Iraq experiences of Alan and his fellow PMCs, combining their precise observations of potentially hazardous encounters, their superstitious rituals, and the taunting games they play with each other with the jargon of military Standard Operating Procedure. In the Iraqi translator, Saad, I reflected the sense of humour that I had found in the Iraqis I met. In the extended ‘Mr Bean’ passage Saad critiques British attitudes towards their translators, outwits Alan by appearing a more sophisticated cultural commentator on Britishness and yet remains the most sympathetic character on stage.

I also read approximately 40 books about contemporary warfare, Iraqi and Middle-Eastern politics, the privatisation of Western militaries, and Iraqi, Arab, and Persian culture.