[title]
Before he cashed in his chips and became a Tory MP, Rory Stewart enjoyed the sort of derring do-heavy life of international diplomacy that most of us would assume went out with TE Lawrence and Gertrude Bell.
Aged 30, with service in the Balkans and - for whatever reason - a two-year-walk across all of Asia behind him, Stewart was out of work. As one does, he flew to Jordan, hopped in a cab to Iraq, used a contact to get himself inside Baghdad's Green Zone and asked if there were any jobs going (Stewart went to Eton, FYI). He was, unbelievably (or not), effectively put in charge of Iraq's Maysan province in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 occupation. The experience is detailed in his acclaimed memoir 'The Prince of the Marshes'. And now there's a play, 'Occupational Hazards'.
What playwright Stephen Brown does well is nail the frenetic, two-steps-forward, one-step-back exhaustion of Stewart's attempt to apply western-style democracy as a salve onto deeply divided Maysam. The play gives a sense of the utter stupidity of the West's blithe belief that Iraq's sectarian tensions - brutally suppressed under Saddam - would simply melt with the introduction of voting: as it turns out, religious extremists with exactly the opposite agenda to Stewart easily won the elections.
As a documentary, 'Occupational Hazards' is okay. As drama, though, it's pretty poor. The main issue is its lead role. Actor Henry Lloyd-Hughes is absolutely fine as Stewart, given what he has to work with, but throughout the course of the play we learn next to nothing about the lead character: what motivated him, how these events affected him, what he did when with his spare time, whether he had any friends out there... anything, really. The fictional Stewart is a total blank slate, an Everyman struggling through a crazy system – a portrait that doesn't even begin to grapple with his complicity, the amount of power he had, his motivation for accepting the job. There is a vague air of guilt, but that's it, really.
Simon Godwin is an experienced director and keeps things bustling at an engaging clip, though the production is peppered in cliche (why make the non-white cast adopt naff 'Arab' accents when almost nobody - Stewart included - is actually supposed to be speaking English?).
But it's the writing that undercuts this play's potential. Rory Stewart is clearly a fascinating man, but we learn nothing about him after the first couple of minutes. He is a void at the centre of his own story, and he leaves it dramatically inert.