Review: The Great Game: Afghanistan

One of the first offerings in the Tricycle’s 12-play Afghanistan season features the same alarming image as the last — that of British troops wondering what the hell they are doing there.

Stephen Jeffreys’s Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad is set in 1842 and deals with the British army’s disastrous trek from Kabul during which they lost 16,000 British and Indian troops at the hands of the Afghans. Canopy of Stars by Simon Stephens is set in 2009 with British soldiers fighting and dying in Helmand.

Yet by the end of this marathon cycle of 12 plays, which is split chronologically into three sections of Afghan history, you seriously doubt the two opinions most often expressed about our involvement in Afghanistan — that we should stay, or that we should stay away. The Great Game teaches us that it is more complex than that.

The theatrical offerings in this festival — there are films and exhibitions too — will take a whole day and an evening to view, although you can see each of the roughly two-and-a-half hour sections on separate days if you prefer.

But however you do it, and whatever your views on the rights and wrongs of British, American and Russian involvement in the affairs of Afghanis, you will surely leave with a sense that our fate, and that of poppy-growing farmers or young girls condemned to a life of enforced childbearing by Taliban nutters, are inextricably linked.

On that score alone, artistic director Nicolas Kent’s most ambitious project, directed mostly by Kent and Indhu Rubasingham, is a triumph.

Britain’s presence in Afghanistan was about protecting the opium trade and British India from Russian advances; now it is about terrorists trained, equipped and radicalised in this wild region of central Asia.

If a bomb had gone off at the Tricycle during the press showing it would have wiped out a lot of playwriting talent. For Kent has gathered an impressive line-up. Ron Hutchinson — whose Moonlight and Magnolias last year so entertainingly explored the nexus of Jewish writing and producing talent in Hollywood — has turned his attention in Durand’s Line to the 19th-century setting of Afghanistan’s borders as negotiated by the arrogant diplomat Sir Henry Mortimer Durand (Michael Cochrane) and Paul Bhattacharjee’s wise Afghan chieftain Amir Rahman. “To believe that a map does not describe a world but brings it into being” is, as the Amir says, about as succinct a summary of the British Empire’s deluded attitude to cartography as you could wish for.

JT Rogers’s Blood & Gifts, directed with flair by Rachel Grunwald, draws on a different negotiation. In the 2007 Hollywood movie Charlie Wilson’s War, Tom Hanks’s American congressman is honoured for driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan by arming the Mujahideen with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Rogers’s play picks up the story with the CIA’s panicky attempt to get the missiles back after they realise they have armed America’s most committed enemy with one of their deadliest weapons.

David Edgar’s Black Tulips satirises a third superpower — the Soviets — who thought a people they viewed as poorly-armed and primitive could be easily dominated. Russian tanks could not point high enough to fire back at the Afghan resistance in the mountains.

A catastrophe almost as absurd is the massacre of the 16,000 British troops described in Stephen Jeffrey’s play, in which Jemma Redgrave plays the diarist Lady Sale, left behind in Kabul by that doomed British convoy. If there is a lesson, it is that lessons are never learned.

Inevitably there are dramatic peaks and troughs during this marathon, and some unconvincing moments too. In Colin Teevan’s The Lion of Kabul, Lolita Chakrabarti’s naive UN envoy takes on the Taliban with the rhetoric of a 1970s feminist.

The plays, monologues and verbatim pieces are all too short for stamina to be an issue. But pithy, sketch-like endings suggest that fewer, longer plays may have delivered a more fulfilling cycle. One exception is David Grieg’s imagined conversation with the Soviet-installed leader Najibullah, which makes the disturbing point that Afghanistan’s modernists are as steeped in blood as their traditionalists.

If I have a complaint it is that too little attention has been paid to the surely crucial question of Afghan casualty figures. They run into the tens of thousands — so many that the British have given up counting. Which begs the same question as that posed by Richard Bean’s On the Side of the Angels, a satire on the NGO industry operating there. They know they are doing good. The problem is, it is impossible to calculate whether they are doing more good than harm.