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The Lion of Kabul

The Great Game was a project developed by Nicholas Kent and Tricycle Theatre at the height of intervention in Afghanistan. I was one of the first writers of 12 approached, and was commissioned to write a 30 minute drama about the West’s relationship with the Taliban. While the Tricycle had developed several cycles of verbatim pieces that bore testimony to sensitive situations over the 15 years, The Great Game was the first to tackle a contemporary issue with original dramas. There were three aspects to the method of research: the library and written evidence; interviews with serving British soldiers, NGO aid workers and journalists; the exploration of my own position. This can be under-estimated in the writing of political drama. Ultimately, the innate contradictions of myself, as a Westerner, who has never visited the place (and at the time travel was forbidden) had to be at the heart of the play, echoing the broader contradiction of foreign nationals trying to determine what is best for Afghanistan. This determined the nature and structure. This examination led me to an insightful by comment by a Taliban Minister of the 1990s: ‘You keep lecturing us about freedom, but the only freedom you do not accept is the freedom to reject your freedom.’ Using the murder of a UN worker in 1998, I constructed the story of a female British Muslim who must reluctantly come to the zoo at midnight to meet a Taliban minister to beg for the bodies of two Afghan aid workers who have gone missing. Many audience members and critics remarked on how shocking it was to see a play that presented the Taliban’s point of view as a coherent and bloody rebuttal of the Western Liberal position.