Choppers for whoppers

Pakistan. Big problem. Burning issue. Put it on stage so we can find out how we got here. J.T. Rogers’s new play opens in 1981 just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A young CIA officer, with the exotic and suggestive name of Jim, sets off for the badlands of Waziristan to offer his support to anyone in a headscarf who wants to kill anyone with a red star on his helmet. He strikes up a mutually exploitative relationship with some mountain-dwelling shepherds. He’ll give them military hardware, they’ll give him information (much of it unreliable). Choppers for whoppers.

If this sounds crushingly predictable, then don’t slash your wrists just yet because there’s a joke coming. Here it is. The uncouth Muslim rustics love The Eagles. Which is funny, in a way, but it’s OK if you didn’t laugh as the joke keeps popping up again and again. Apparently, gags get funnier the more they’re told to the same audience.

Everything in this play is static, wordy, unnatural and mechanical. It’s like a dramatisation of a downloaded thesis created with Microsoft’s ‘Thesis Dramatiser’ programme available exclusively to NT playwrights who write about burning issues. I doubt if Lloyd Owen had to reach far to find the inner corpse he brings to the role of Jim. Or maybe his work-to-rule performance is a sardonic verdict on the playwright’s powers of characterisation.

Owen deserves better, as does Matthew Marsh, a wonderfully subtle and menacing stage presence reduced here to playing a pantomime Russian who calls everyone comrade and doesn’t use the definite article. The clichés keep coming. The Pakistani generals are sleazy windbags, the Muslim tribesmen are medieval jobsworths (‘wife give daughter, worth less than dust’), and the Brits are represented by an excitable toff who’s overfond of whisky.