Dubya and his cronies take a comic beating

A few months ago, a group of Texans flew in for an evening to see “The Madness of George Dubya,” a satirical play about the man who some people in the world still have a hard time believing is really the president of the United States.

They whooped it up as a short man in Superman T-shirt, pajamas, silver-sprayed hair and thick painted-on eyebrows spoke in a too-Southern accent, squinting and frowning as the malapropisms slipped from his thin lips (War on Tourism, Iraquistania, Arabistania, Guacamole Bay, weapons of mass distraction, etc.). They jeered as he stirred from his teddy-bear-hugging slumber to give an idiot’s commentary on the near-destruction-of-the-world-by- megalomaniac-lunatics action, or to point a toy pistol, or to almost kiss Tony Blair on the mouth.

It might say something about the state of the nation that Americans starved for live political satire have to fly across the pond to get their fill. Last fall, Michael Moore staged a sold-out one-man show that revisited much of the content of his bestselling “Stupid White Men” on the London stage, not on Broadway. And in Paris, Attilio Maggiulli, the head of the Comedie Italienne, a small Montparnasse theater troupe, has recently reprised his “George W. Bush, or God’s Sad Cowboy,” a political spoof that opened April 30, two weeks after the Iraq war was declared effectively over. Three days into the run, the Italian director was attacked by two unidentified men, who punched him and slashed his face with a knife. The play closed, but it reopened May 20.

Written and directed by Justin Butcher, “The Madness of George Dubya” opened in January in a north London fringe theater and has since made its way to the West End. It currently runs at the Arts Theatre until the end of June.

“We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of Americans coming to see this show,” says the Oxford-educated, 33-year-old Butcher, whose best-known play to date is his 2001 “Scaramouche Jones,” which starred Pete Postlethwaite. Butcher sits in the cafe of the theater on a recent afternoon, a McDonald’s dominating the view from its large windows. “The vast majority of Americans who come to see this show just wet themselves laughing. We’ve had something like 50 theaters in the United States petitioning us for the rights to produce the play there.”

Those interested include Tim Robbins, who came to see the show recently and said he wanted to bring it to New York.

Thrown together quickly

Both pieces were dashed off in days and flung on stage quickly, angry responses to a sense of frustration about escalating world events -- and it shows. “The Madness of George Dubya” -- which takes its title from “The Madness of King George,” the 1991 Alan Bennett play and 1994 film about King George III’s descent into insanity -- is a noisy, grossly caricatured rip-off of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 “Dr. Strangelove” in which a whacked-out U.S. commanding general orders a nuclear strike against Iraq -- and nearly sets off an all-out war in the Middle East. It includes reprised and rewritten songs by 1960s political songwriter Tom Lehrer and features such thinly veiled personalities as Colin Dick, Donald Duck and Tony Blear.

Encouraged by the success of Moore’s one-man show, Butcher wrote the play in three days after Christmas, rehearsed it in six, and had it on stage in a 100-seat theater Jan. 14 to coincide with the buildup toward war. He hasn’t slowed down with the war’s end. He adds a few current events jokes each day to keep it feeling fresh. He takes as many shots at his government as at the Bush administration, and the only jokes that get a bigger laugh than the Yank-bashing ones are those about the French -- whom the British love to hate as much as Americans do. In one memorable line, “Dubya” vows to wage war on “poverty, tyranny, injustice and France,” striking at its stores of Camembert.

Reviewers have mostly applauded the effort, if they’ve been somewhat lukewarm about the result. Michael Billington of the left-wing Guardian newspaper said: “Satire is all but dead on the London stage, so this show deserves the warmest of welcomes,” and went on to declare the burgeoning movement toward using theater as “a vital focus for opposition,” possessing “a capacity for rapid response that TV drama either cannot -- or will not -- attempt to match.”

The right-wing Daily Telegraph said: “Convinced that this would be a lumbering attempt to catch -- and cash in on -- the mood of the moment, imagine my surprise on finding Butcher’s lampooning assault on the most powerful man in the world and his buddies a welcome blast of light relief amid all the doom, gloom and rolling news.” Another reviewer said: “OK, so it’s not subtle, and its student-revue-style antics -- soldiers in fishnets, a cockney cleaning lady and some ropey satirical songs -- can grate, but when ‘Dubya’ hits the mark, it has a devastating effect.”

Preaching to the choir

Americans in Europe are often surprised at how nuanced and balanced the level of debate about U.S. affairs can be, but this show reveals none of that high-mindedness, resorting instead to broad stereotypes that undoubtedly preach to the choir.

“Satire is a blunt weapon, undoubtedly,” Butcher says, “almost as blunt as a carefully targeted U.S. bombing strike. It’s an angry, brash, irreverent response to what’s going on. I think that the neoconservative influence in this administration is out of control. That this administration’s aims are dangerous and wild way beyond what we even get in the newspapers. Once one starts burrowing into publications like the Project for the New American Century or monographs written by Richard Perle or whatever, you realize that the dream scenario for these guys is a great sway of U.S.-Israeli hegemony right across the Middle East and Central Asia. It’s madness, absolute madness. The extremities of U.S. foreign policy are so outrageous at the moment that they don’t deserve rational debate in many ways.”

In the play, Dubya confuses the Project for the New American Century (the neoconservative foreign policy blueprint) and its acronym PNAC with “Plan for Nuking Arab Countries.” Butcher says he has gotten a small number of angry e-mails from Americans, but many more have written to say they find it refreshing that there is a theatrical outlet for dissenting voices. Butcher is aware that his kind of talk can get you in trouble in the land of the free these days. But that doesn’t stop him from speaking his mind, or pointing out that loving one’s country sometimes means criticizing it.

“I was very, very angry about the buildup of the military in the Gulf and the way that Britain was trotting along obediently behind America -- that we appeared to be sleepwalking into this war,” Butcher says. “What happened to Tony Blair? That’s just inexplicable to so many of us who voted for him.”

Maggiulli, an Italian who has lived in Paris and run the Comedie Italienne for 30 years and who staged an anti-Silvio Berlusconi play about the right-wing Italian prime minister at his tiny theater last year, said he asked himself the same question: “How could a man like Tony Blair, who was in the beginning a man of the left, and, with 70% of the population, was against the war -- how could a monsieur like that go in Bush’s direction?” he asked rhetorically a few weeks ago, in the lobby of a Paris hospital, where he wore a black baseball cap, a black leather jacket and jeans. He smoked American cigarettes and wore bandages on his forehead and cheek. “My explanation as a man of the theater is -- they’re in love.”

‘Joyous, bad-tempered’

In his play, Tony and George talk dirty to one another and kiss in between playing war games with toy soldiers and play trucks, with George calling his “Daddy” on an imaginary cell phone to remind him who’s the boss. A vampire-like “God of the Dollar” floats in periodically, to brainwash him into trying to forcibly create a mass international market that will be called “The United States of the World.”

An article in the Paris daily Le Monde called the show “a joyous and bad-tempered satirical tract” that had its roots as much in commedia dell’arte as in the 1970s political theater of Italian Dario Fo. “It’s lively, funny, spirited, politically pertinent. Excessive, not always very subtle. The art of farce in the face of the bad farce of war and intolerance.”

Maggiulli’s attackers have not been identified, but they accused the director of “defending the Arabs” and made a slur against French President Jacques Chirac. Maggiulli decided to reprise the play when a group of his colleagues, including the film director Jean-Jacques Beineix, offered to stand guard at the door in a show of solidarity. (Maggiulli says he didn’t want to call in the police.) He has removed the show’s posters -- which portray Bush as a skull in a cowboy hat -- from the front of the theater, and cameras have been installed in the entryway.

“I guess the show upset someone,” he said in the hospital, “whether it’s a friend of Berlusconi, a friend of Bush, a friend of Bin Laden, I don’t know and I don’t want to know because as far as I’m concerned they hurt my baby. I know it’s a pretty hard and critical play,” he said. “It’s a slap to Monsieur Bush and all his administration who think that us Europeans are big children to whom it’s sufficient to tell lies for us to believe them. We aren’t that naive. In the United States, there is a move toward hegemony, colonization -- there’s a new Rome that’s in the process of being installed, with an enormous power that doesn’t even have the awareness of its own power. I don’t think that America understands -- when it moves, it breaks everything.”

Maggiulli says he is “in love” with California, and would like to bring the play to the States. “I’d love to take this piece to New York and Los Angeles,” he says, “but I don’t think immigration would let me in.”