Blood and Gifts

Blood and Gifts is the second play I’ve seen by American playwright JT Rogers. He’s also had Madagascar on at Theatre 503 and this play began as a 25-minute play as part of The Great Game. However, all I’d seen before was The Overwhelming, a play about the beginnings of the Rwandan genocide, done by Out of Joint in the Cottesloe.

This is about the covert US intervention in 1980s war in Afghanistan war. It takes us from the decision to put CIA operatives into Pakistan in 1981 to aid the Mujahideen and ends with the 1991 decision to close the book on US operations over there. It focuses on Jim Warnock, the CIA guy looking after operations there, but we also see a Soviet spy, a British MI6 figure and of course many figures from the Pakistan ISI and one rebel group. We watch the war turn from a battle for supremacy and territory between covert superpowers to a religious war. Of course it’s partly a history play, but mainly a history of the present. To anyone who wonders how the Taliban and a Mujahideen and maybe al-Qaeda come to be fighting allied and NATO forces as they are, this play shows us.

It’s pretty good. It is written in a structural style that feels a little dated - Edgar, Hare that sort of play - and there is a frankly manifested desire to educate us about the war that I never find edifying. But that’s all I have to fault it with. It is educating; but it’s also a bit of a thriller, with twists and  good characters and some terrific jokes. The play finds absurd laughter in the situation: the Mujahideen soldiers are desperate for US weapons, but almost equally desperate for Tina Turner cassettes. The Pakistani ISI Colonel has a Clerk who offers jarringly funny moments of sycophancy. The play captures very well the difference between British and American policy and British and American senses of humour. There is a refreshing sense that no one is just mocked, everyone is treated seriously. Rogers has done his homework but also his heartwork properly trying to let his characters stand on their own two feet.

I must say, though it’s been admired by most of the critics, I didn’t take to Howard Davies’s production. Mostly scene changes were effected by whizzing in side panels to create new backgrounds - which is a good thing, kept the thing moving and allowed a sense of the ‘runaway train’ aspect of this war - but there was a horribly taupe and foursquare set that had very little magic to it. There was a little too much of the main character looking out craggily to the audience as the lights went down on a scene. It all felt clunky and stolid and self-important. Some terrific performances though.

In short: not my sort of thing really, but vigorously written and I learned a lot.