Yesterday evening I delighted in seeing Guantanamo Baywatch. This is the latest satirical anti-Bush play to open in London, being the third play in Justin Butcher's Dubya Trilogy. The first was
The Madness of George Dubya, followed by
A Weapons Inspector Calls.
In the play the Prime Minister Tony Cojones Blair takes his wife to the new holiday resort of Guantanamo Bay, where the bright beach umbrellas and tropical drinks are offered up before barbed wire fencing and prisoners in orange jumpsuits. Dubya and Laura come onto the beach, and Dubya explains the new plan, "Once we catch all them tourists, we're going to bring them here to Guantanamo Bay and throw away the key!"
Dubya and Tony run in slow motion toward each other in rapt adoration before manfully clasping hands and rushing off to a press conference to promote "the new caring face of Guantanamo Bay." Secretary Rumsfeld adds that he is debating adding a chapter to the Lonely Planet Guide "on anal violation across the Byzantine Levant."
After a bit too much tequila on the beach, Laura sheds her dull matron exterior to transform into Alice from Wonderland News, complete with blue pinafore. She wanders around through Guantanamo asking the sorts of questions the media should have been asking about the upside down world in which America imprisons poor people from a far away land without charges, without counsel, without trial, without hope.
Three prisoners - all with distinctive British accents - try to pass the time by composing a song about their plight. They sing this hilariously to the tune of Don't Fence Me In. This is a neat juxtaposition of American country/western ideals of individual freedom and the bizarre plight of the prisoners. Among the lines: 'I want to ride the ridge where the West Bank commences / Gaze at Al-Jazeera `til I lose my senses . . ' They are overheard and it is decided that there should be a show to entertain Tony and Dubya. Although it was never explicitly referenced, I couldn't help but think ironically of the moving lament from the Bible when the Jews are required to sing for the King as slaves in Babylon.
The prisoners are aided in putting the show together by Jasmina the Cleaner (which rhymes when you have an Essex accent). She is secretly an agent of Hamas who has gained her job under an outsourcing contract. Under her cleaner's snap-front smock, she wears a girdle of dynamite and bra trimmed with detonators.
When the curtain opens for the evening performance, the prisoners are thong-clad and piled into the familiar Abu Ghraib pyramid. The prisoners do a wonderful satire on Pyramus and Thisbe depicted as Palestine and Judea, whispering their love through a another prisoner in a wall costume. This is followed by a cowboy song pastiche, The Myth of Redemptive Violence. At the end of the show, while regaling Bush and Blair with a modified So Long, Farewell, the prisoners slip away to escape, watched by a sympathetic soldier who refuses to shoot them as they flee.
Sometimes reality is so harsh that it can only be meaningfully exposed with humour. These plays, clever and inspired, shine a spotlight on a dark and dangerous stain on the honour of both nations.
All three plays in the trilogy are running in repertoire at the New Player's Theatre in London until 20th November.