Voices emerge from Guantanamo

If the nearly 600 men being detained at Guantanamo Bay feel isolated and forgotten, one theater group in London remembers -- and has put them center stage.

“Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is the ironic title of a London play whose dialogue is drawn directly from interviews, speeches and letters of family members of detainees, freed prisoners, government officials and others.

In a cool, understated way, it packs an emotional and political punch -- so much so that barely three weeks after its premiere, it has moved to London’s West End from a fringe neighborhood playhouse in working-class Kilburn. The production will open in New York next month off-Broadway at the 45 Bleecker Street Theatre.

Reviews have generally been raves, with a few critics saying “Guantanamo” should be obligatory viewing. The play is emblematic of a powerful trend in Britain -- today’s news and political debates being taken directly to the stage -- and its very currency makes for a compelling theatrical experience.

In addition to “Guantanamo,” several theatrical works have been plucked from the headlines: “The Private Room,” also concerning the Guantanamo detainees; “Manifest Destiny,” an opera in the works about America’s global role; and “The Arab-Israeli Cookbook,” a mixture of recipes and politics that views present-day Jerusalem from the perspective of Arab and Israeli household kitchens.

Later in the year, a new play by David Hare, Britain’s master of political drama, is coming to London’s National Theatre. “Stuff Happens” -- its title taken from a speech by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on the looting of Baghdad in April last year -- is described as a historical narrative on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Although it is difficult to gauge the effect of all this political edification, since “Guantanamo” opened, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government went public with criticism of its chief ally, the United States, over the detention camp. Blair is demanding that the last British prisoners be turned over for adjudication by British justice and said this week that Guantanamo is an “anomaly that has at some point got to be brought to an end.”

Even the more conservative British journals have been moved. “A clear-eyed assessment,” said the Daily Telegraph. “Anyone who is seriously interested in the values that sustain civilization [should] see this production,” said the Financial Times.

“The British theater -- indeed, every Briton -- should be proud of this play,” is the ringing endorsement by the Sunday Times.

It may not be surprising that a play about alleged mistreatment of British prisoners by the United States would be well received here, given the public’s current antiwar mood. According to polls, backing for the war in Iraq has been sliding to about 40%, and Blair’s loyalty to Bush and his unapologetic support for the war are deemed his chief political liability in the next elections.

Using their own words and the testimony of those around them, the play humanizes the prisoners and their families. Seeing the detainees as individuals instead of generic terrorists, the audience at least questions the evidence used in locking them away and, in particular, the system that has allowed them to be held for years -- in some cases with no sentence or independent hearing.

The play was the brainchild of the politically active director of the Tricycle Theatre, Nicolas Kent. Early this year, months before the emergence of the scandalous photographs from Abu Ghraib in Iraq focused attention on prison abuses, he enlisted Victoria Brittain, former associate foreign editor of London’s Guardian newspaper, and novelist Gillian Slovo to dramatize the prison.

Both writers have long been engaged in political issues. Slovo is the daughter of Joe Slovo, a lifelong communist who was Nelson Mandela’s close ally in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. (Her mother, ANC activist Ruth First, was killed in a 1982 bombing widely believed to be engineered by the South African police.) Brittain, meanwhile, has written on human rights problems and injustice in Africa and the Middle East.

The play takes the form of monologues and vignettes derived mainly from interviews they conducted with the people caught in the Guantanamo saga, as well as some speeches and news conference transcripts from public figures such as Rumsfeld and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, artfully shuffled to tell a story of the detainees and of the camp itself.

Brittain, in an interview, said Kent’s decision to do the play was “a really amazing shot in the dark” and required a frenetic pace of work to bring to realization. Eager to get it staged as quickly as possible, Kent set up the interviews for Brittain and Slovo, and hired a team of transcriptionists to take down the often poignant results.

Many of the families of the nine British detainees then held at Guantanamo already felt burned in their encounters with Britain’s raucous newspaper culture, Brittain recalled. They felt that they had spoken to the reporters only to see their remarks misquoted or fictionalized when they appeared in print. The two playwrights earned their trust, she said, when they promised that the only words that would be heard onstage would be those actually uttered by the interviewees.

Among the most compelling was the interview of Azmat Begg, the retired banker father of internee Moazzam Begg. The Indian immigrant from a military family loyal to the queen was interviewed in the modest front room of his row house in a suburb of Birmingham.

His story, and Moazzam’s, forms the backbone of the play, with actor Badi Uzzaman capturing perfectly the Anglo-Indian argot and the anguish of the older Begg, a former heart patient whose affection for his son does not hide that he considered him starry-eyed and a bit foolish.

Actor Paul Bhattacharjee plays the son, his script drawn from Moazzam’s irregularly received correspondence home. In the course of the play, the audience accompanies him on a slow descent into despair.

The success of the play, which they had expected to be a money-loser, has astounded its creators. “Suddenly royalties are around,” Brittain said.

Money is also collected after each showing for a legal defense fund for the internees, and negotiations are underway to bring the show to Australia, Sweden and Belgium.

Brittain points out that political theater and cinema has a long pedigree in Britain, existing quietly alongside more commercial fare. The Tricycle has been at the center of the movement, staging plays about Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Srebrenica massacre and the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trial, among others, some of which reached a mass audience through the BBC.

But political drama appears to be reaching a popular apogee of late, and there has been “nothing with quite the timing” of Guantanamo, Brittain said: “This is the first time a play as political as this has come to a really mainline theater.”

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Janet Stobart of The Times’ London bureau contributed to this report.