The evidence was devastating. Week after week, month after month, the headlines were stark:
Blair government became ‘prisoner’ of US;
Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, told Chilcot that, far from making the UK safer, participating in the US-led invasion actually increased the terror threat.
Tony Blair promised George Bush support without telling MPs, and held key meetings about the planned invasion of Iraq without telling members of his cabinet and with no record of what was said. Military commanders were told not to prepare for war overtly; Whitehall utterly failed to prepare for the aftermath – failure that contributed to the growing insurgency and the ill-treatment of Iraqis by poorly trained and badly equipped British soldiers.
The testimony from witnesses in 2010 and 2011 was startling. Then, it seemed, all was forgotten, as the Chilcot inquiry got bogged down for years, first in arguments with Whitehall over what it could publish about Blair’s conversations with Bush, then with those who were sent draft passages of the report in which they were criticised.
So, instead of waiting for Wednesday’s publication of the official report of 2.6m words, I decided, with the young director Matt Woodhead, to distil it into 20,000 words for the theatre, in a two-hour production called, simply, Chilcot.
It played at the Lowry theatre in Salford and the Battersea Arts Centre in south London, to audiences that included a senior member of the inquiry. Many were turned away as the runs were short. But it underlined a huge appetite for verbatim theatre, which had already been demonstrated by the “tribunal plays” I had earlier written for Nicolas Kent, former artistic director of the Tricycle in London.
I have suggested before that the theatre can be an extension of journalism, another platform where the key issues and arguments can be presented in a way that is both fair and digestible for audiences who have neither the time nor inclination to follow the necessarily slow progress of long-running investigations and inquiries.
A playscript carries the theatre’s capacity to dramatise, illuminate and condense into the reading world, making it available to many more than were able to cram themselves into two small theatres. How many will read the numerous volumes of Chilcot’s report – even the “executive summary” of more than 100 pages? How many direct quotes will be included in the plethora of reporting and comment the report will unleash?
The cold evidence to the inquiry, in the witnesses’ own words, is enough.
• Chilcot, by Richard Norton-Taylor and Matt Woodhead is published by Oberon.
