Mocking the White House at War
The New York Times
April 14, 2003
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, April 13 - In the run-up to the war with Iraq,
when Justin Butcher's "Madness of George Dubya"
was playing at a fringe theater in
north London, Mr. Butcher began to sense that some Americans might
bridle at his virulent lampoon of the Bush administration and its
readiness to go to war.
A "hostile minority" of e-mail messages, he said, demanded
to know how he would feel after a terror attack on his own country.
(He replied that Britain had indeed
known Irish Republican terrorism.)
Some asked why he was not grateful for
Europe's salvation by the United States in the Second World War.
(He replied that until 1941 the United
States "sat very profitably on the sidelines" of that conflict.)
Some even pointed out, he said, that if he were living in a country run by his "hero"
Saddam Hussein, he would be "lowered into a vat of acid" for
the kind of dissent and disrespect that is in his revue.
But Mr. Butcher seems far from intimidated.
Now that his show has moved from the fringe into
London's mainstream West End for a four-week run at the Arts Theater set to end on May 3, "The
Madness of George Dubya" has been hailed by some critics here as an overdue revival of political satire on the London stage. Mr. Butcher, the writer
and the director, wants to take it to American theaters, too.
The breakthrough into the West End was a triumph
for Mr. Butcher, 33, a playwright who as an undergraduate studied classics at Oxford before
training as an actor at the Drama Studio in London. Before
"The Madness of George Dubya," his best-known work was a one-man show,
"Scaramouche Jones," about a clown who breaks five decades
of silence to commemorate the year 2000 and his 100th birthday so he can tell his life
story as he removes the greasepaint for the last time.
"Dubya" - part vaudeville, part farce, part cabaret - has become
the newest emblem of the frustration and ambivalence felt by some Britons at
being drawn into a war as the principal allies of an
American administration that provokes incredulity and resentment
rather than loyalty among
many of them.
"It's undoubtedly anti-Bush," Mr. Butcher said, "but to understand
it as an anti-American diatribe is to miss the point." To describe it as topical
might be an understatement, too. From its conception to its first
production took less than three weeks, he said.
The United States, Mr. Butcher said, justified a war on Iraq
by "a series of palpable hoaxes" that left him "increasingly flabbergasted by the
shameless, manipulative cynicism of the whole approach."
He was so incensed that starting late in December he resolved to cast, write and stage
his revue, which opened just over two weeks later, on Jan. 14,
in the Theatro Technis fringe theater in north London. It opened in the West End last
Monday.
The subtitle of "The Madness of George Dubya" is "Strangelove Revisited,"
reflecting the way the show reworks the 1963 Stanley Kubrick movie, "Dr.
Strangelove," as the story of a rogue American general at a British
air base ordering a nuclear strike on a distant desert country identified variously
as Iraqistan and Arabistan.
(The title also draws on Alan Bennett's 1991 play
"The Madness of George III," which became the 1994 movie "The
Madness of King George," depicting the descent into madness
of a ruler encircled by a coterie of loyalists.)
The events are cast as a dream by Dubya, a George W. Bush look-alike.
He is sometimes seen wearing paisley pajamas over a Superman T-shirt,
clutching a huge teddy bear and armed with toy pistols.
Much is made of heavily accented
malapropisms - "the war on tourism," "weapons of mass
distraction."
At first it seems odd that the revue should hark back so much to the cold war era.
The Kubrick movie still stands as a classic protest against
nuclear militarism, and this latest revisiting underscores the
sense of cold war polarization by using lyrics and music by an American, Tom Lehrer.
The show ends with a rousing chorus of "We will all go together when we go."
The parallel, Mr. Butcher said, is deliberate, intended to evoke
similarities between the mind-set of the cold war and that of the campaign against
terrorism as promoted by the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Our constant state is one of being at war," Mr. Butcher said.
Some Americans might be perturbed by the caricatures of their president
and of the people around him - the Dubya figure calls them "Colin, Dick,
Donald Duck." This Dubya, who seeks to wage war
on "poverty, tyranny, injustice and France," is a childlike
character easily manipulated by a
ruthless entourage of advisers drawn from the oil and arms industries.
American officers like General Kipper, who orders a nuclear
strike on a distant Muslim country, are shown as deranged zealots. The American pilots
who fly the nuclear-attack plane are shown as ignorant and self-absorbed,
more interested in pornography than the land they are about to bomb.
Some characters seem to be caricatures of American politicians
whose own words have already made them seem like caricatures to some of their
critics. "All you have to do is transcribe their utterances, and it needs
very little embellishment," Mr. Butcher said. "You couldn't invent it."
The British characters, by contrast, are more or less bumblers
dragged along in the powerful American wake. Prime Minister Tony Blear is
preoccupied by a real estate deal - a real-life scandal that swirled
around Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie, last year. Group Captain
Windbreak is the very model of British deference as he seeks to dissuade
General Kipper from ordering a nuclear strike. "Quite so," he murmurs, as
the American officer demurs. "See your point."
Wafiq Dizeez, an Arab envoy, introduces a serious long moment
in chronicling British and American involvement in Iraq since the early 20th
century. The counterpoint is Yasmina, the cleaner from Al Qaeda,
a suicide bomber who wears a belt of explosives over flimsy underwear beneath
her cleaner's housecoat.
Mr. Butcher called the show a "hotch-potch of revue, satire,
cabaret, stand-up, vaudeville." In a way, it is also news: with events in Iraq moving so
fast, the play is updated daily for new jokes.
"Coalition forces have today secured many areas of the city of Belfast,"
Dubya said during last Monday's performance as President Bush met Mr.
Blair in Northern Ireland.
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