TV Reviews : ‘War That Never Ends’ a Chilling Parable

The term anti-war drama used to really mean something in the days when they were still making pro-war movies. Now comes a drama that’s not only anti-war in a totally unexpected way but also is anti-TV.

“The War That Never Ends” (on Bravo today at 4 p.m. and midnight) reaches back to ancient Greece, dramatizing Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta in the most minimalist way imaginable.

Director Jack Gold’s style borrows from current-affairs programs, with Thucydides (Alec McGowan) as the “anchor” interpreting the rhetoric, machinations and political expediency of characters who disturbingly mirror our own world.

Except that the words you hear were written in the Fifth Century B.C. A plain cyclorama serves as the Greek city states. The rest might be talking heads in Nehru jackets were this not a vocally astonishing company of British actors (featuring, among many, Ben Kingsley as Pericles and Don Henderson as a memorable Socrates).

As you hear these statesmen coolly sculpture the rhythms and cadences of language only to implacably slide into war, the story’s timeliness, 2 1/2 millennia later, becomes a chilling parable.

British writer John Barton, a Shakespeare scholar, first adapted the Peloponnesian war history in 1965 in response to the Vietnam War, then reworked it, premiering it on the BBC five days before the start of the Gulf War. Now this U.S. premiere arrives with echoing rhetoric swirling over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Aptly, the end credit roll is accompanied by a babbling voice-over of familiar tongues from the 6 o’clock news that sound eerily like those old Athenians and Spartans.