Stuff Happens

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In Hare's terms, and in Joe Morton's performance, Powell emerges as a tragic figure: the one key player in the administration who sees the folly of invasion but who, in a climactic encounter with Bush, bites the bullet and goes along with the Cheney-Rumsfeld line. Hare never explains what leads to Powell's capitulation, but he leaves you in no doubt that it was a form of self-betrayal. Yet beyond its inspired premise, and the crisp aplomb of Sullivan’s production, Stuff Happens is a catalogue of disappointments. Hare wanted to show how Bush decided to invade Iraq and why Blair chose to follow him. Except for a few last-minute addenda, that means the story stops three years ago, before Abu Ghraib, Plamegate, and the other calamities of the occupation. The play’s action has been, as they say, overtaken by events. I love a book that talks in a kid's voice. It makes us feel important and special. The thing I like the most about these books are that they tell different perspectives of everyday things in life.' Mr 10 – Readingtree.com.au

What went wrong? I sense the slight but unmistakable pressure of a playwright’s thumb upon the political scales. Hare seems unwilling to sympathize with the neocons, who were, after all, the chief architects of the war. Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz is permitted to make his strongest argument (for a revolution in military affairs or the promotion of democracy, respectively) in his own voice. It’s telling that the most resounding defense of the war comes not from one of the historical principals but from an unnamed Angry Journalist, who delivers his speech outside the action and is never heard from again. Hare's other key means of creating conflict is to view Colin Powell as a stern realist in a Bush war cabinet made up of deluded fantasists. In a big showdown with Bush, based on documented facts, Powell passionately presses the case for treating war as a last resort after diplomacy has been exhausted. In the play's best line, he points out the hypocrisy of American attitudes. "People keep asking," he says of Saddam, "how do we know he's got weapons of mass destruction? How do we know? Because we've still got the receipts." The part of the record that always resonated most strongly with me didn’t make it into Hare’s script. While testifying to Congress just before the war began, Wolfowitz dismissed the notion that it would take more troops to stabilize Iraq than to defeat it. “Hard to imagine,” he said. In fact, no imagination whatsoever was needed to read those projections; even if it had been, it’s the least we ask of our leaders. Those three horrible little words tell you the whole story of how a failure of mind, a collapse of the intellect, let the war go so badly awry. They’re why we should demand more from Hare’s play than he has provided. With its very large cast of characters (and many meaty roles) Stuff Happens lends itself to school drama productions.But in terms of what's going on in that country, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over and over and over again of some buy walking out with a vase and say, 'Oh, my goodness, you didn't have a plan.'

Early on Hare introduces the main players in his huge cast of characters, the figures -- including Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Kofi Annan, and Hans Blix -- very briefly stepping forward and summarily introduced. Rumsfeld is one of the most controversial figures of the Bush era and his autobiography has long been awaited. The Guardian obtained an advance copy. If political drama has any purpose at all, it’s to sharpen our minds, upset our prejudices, tax our imaginations—in short, to help keep us out of these messes in the future. But Hare’s mechanical recap doesn’t level that kind of challenge, doesn’t arm us to think more rigorously about the world. It would be nice to think we’ll be just fine without more stories like Antigone debating Creon, Hal fighting Hotspur, or Laura Bush wrestling with her conscience about dead Iraqi children (in the one-act by Tony Kushner that may be, line for line, the best political drama of the Bush years). But the night I saw Stuff Happens, I came home to read that the administration is drawing up its plans for Iran.Finally a very strong point of society’s perception of the events is given by an Iraqi exile at the end of the book. The Iraqi even admits to hating Saddam Hussein by saying “I even longed for the fall of the dictator”, but the comment that Donald Rumsfeld totally changed his perception of things. He shows this by bringing up the way the Americans who died are counted and given an honorary ceremony but the Iraqi’s are unaccounted for. This shows how the war was totally unfair and that they considered the Iraqis not to be human. Hare, in fact, constantly creates a form of internal dialectic. The play ruthlessly exposes the dubious premises on which the war was fought. At the same time, it questions our complacency by reminding us of the pro-war arguments. A New Labour politician - possibly not a million miles from Ann Clwyd - admits that the supposed weapons turned out not to exist and that a military victory was compromised by sloppy Pentagon planning for peace. "At the same time," she argues, "a dictator was removed." Sir David Hare has always been a political writer, so it should not come as too much of a surprise to find him jumping on this bandwagon. The question that he has found himself having to answer is what he can add to lifetimes of media coverage, Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 and the other plays. Stuff Happens is a play by David Hare, written in response to the Iraq war during the Bush administration. It talks about the events that led to the war on Iraq in 2003, which ps from George Bush’s election in 2000 up till his stepping down from office in 2008. The title is inspired by Donald Rumsfeld’s response to journalists about the looting happening in Baghdad where he replied “Stuff Happens”. The writer already states in the authors note that it is “knowingly true” but he had to use his imagination in parts that were not covered especially when the politicians were behind closed doors.

The events of September 11, 2001 and the political aftermath, bringing us up to the present day, are then explored in detail. Once it becomes clear that Bush has decided on war, then there is a powerful incentive for those around him to find a rationale for the coming conflict that they can live with. After all, they can’t dissuade this man. As Swift’s wonderful aphorism puts it, which is attached as an epigraph to the play: “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” David Hare's Stuff Happens is a play about the events that led up to the 2003 Iraq War. The play focuses on the diplomatic side of the war. The play begins at George Bush's election in November 2000 and ends around April 2004. Parts of the dialogue are direct quotes from the characters' real-world counterparts. The play is about real people and real events that had occurred. Hare states that "the events within [the play] have been authenticated from multiple sources, both private and public." [2] Hare also stated that the dialogue is not “knowingly untrue” but he had to sometimes “use his imagination” to cover events that were not recorded verbatim, admitting that his play is not a documentary as such. [2] The events during the play are as follows: For the American TV show, see Stuff Happens (TV show). For the common slang phrase, see Shit happens. Hare has the words repeated right at the beginning of the play and, given how the situation has developed since Rumsfeld made his comments, they are now even more disturbing and powerful:Doing a book clearout? Titles which can definitely go include: out-of-date manuals and textbooks; bestselling novels or Man Booker winners from the early 2000s that you bought and never read, and know you’ll never read but keep out of some sort of intellectual guilt; out-of-date exercise and diet books. If items need to be fixed, place them in an easily reachable area near the front door and schedule a time to make the repair happen.