Radio

Sound barrier

Wednesday, 9th May 2007

‘The poem has become a byword for truth-telling,’ is how Eliot Weinberger’s epic list of quotations from politicians and military personnel about the war in Iraq has been described. It was first published in the London Review of Books in February 2005, but a theatrical version was performed on Radio Four on Friday evening, dramatised by Simon Levy for the Fountain Theatre Company of Los Angeles and directed for radio by Tim Dee. What I Heard About Iraq is hardly a play in the conventional sense. There is no interaction, no character development, nothing happens. The five actors merely quote the words of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, with a few Iraqis added in to leaven the mix. Their statements to us are played out against a specially created soundscape of gunshots, bomb blasts and keening women. The point presumably is to show just how surreal the world has become, with politicians saying one thing one day and the exact opposite the next. Truth, always a slippery thing, has become ever more elusive in the first years of this new millennium.

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