Staging a fight against war

The BBC may be bloodied but now the reasons for our war against Saddam Hussein's regime are to fall under the scrutiny of another powerful, publicly funded British institution: The National Theatre.

The NT's new season will culminate in September with a play by one of the war's fiercest critics, Sir David Hare, and directed by the theatre's artistic chief, Nicholas Hytner. It will be called Stuff Happens.

Sir David has taken his title from a quote by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld last April: "Stuff happens... and it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."

The NT said the basis of Stuff Happens is a letter sent to President Clinton six years ago, well before 9/11, by a political group called Project For A New American Century, signed by members including Mr Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The letter said American foreign policy "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power".

Hytner said: "It is a matter of great interest to us that Project For A New American Century, whose members now dominate the Pentagon, announced in 1998 they thought the chief aim of American foreign policy should be to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

"I think, therefore, what we are suggesting is that our look at the events that led up to the invasion of Iraq will be in the context of that incontrovertible fact."

There was little doubt as to Sir David's position on the war in Iraq.

In a searing attack published in The Guardian on 12 April last year, the playwright wrote: "Somebody explain to me: not just the feebleness of the rationale, the evident lies needed to be told by the Americans to try - and fail - to persuade international opinion that they had a right to invade."

The play will be available to the

largest possible NT audience as the final production of the year in the hugely popular Travelex, £10-a-seat season in the 1,100-seater Olivier theatre. It will run for two months.