Fringe favourites take aim at politics

Lord Hutton may not have delivered his judgment on Tony Blair's reasoning for war on Iraq yet, but the verdict of a string of shows at the Edinburgh Festival will not please Alastair Campbell.

After years in which even the hint of politics was a sure way of emptying theatres, there is a new hunger for plays questioning Britain's readiness to embark on foreign adventures.

The two biggest hits of the Fringe so far, Gregory Burke's eagerly looked-forward-to second play The Straits, the follow-up to his award-winning Gargarin Way, and Henry Adam's The People Next Door, deal with a Britain pumped up to take on enemies within and without.

Both are a million miles from the angry agitprop of the 80s. Rather like Liz Lochhead's Thebans, adapted from Sophocles' Greek epic about a failed attempt to draw a corrupt ruling class back from conflict, they are oblique parables, and, according to the critics, are all the more devastating for that.

The Straits, set in Gibraltar early in the Falklands war in 1982, where the children of British servicemen fight the local "Spicks" on the annual unofficial "anti-English day", deals with how a residual militaristic mindset left over from empire blights each new generation.

His fellow Scot Adam's hilarious tragi-comedy follows a hapless drugged-up dropout called Nigel whose Pakistani half-brother Karim is suspected of being in a Muslim fundamentalist plot to blow up planes approaching Heathrow with Sam-7 missiles.

As in Burke's play, the state has dirty hands, in the shape of a maverick police officer on a personal crusade against an Islamist fifth column.

But the most overtly political new work is the American play Pugilist Specialist, a dire warning about the danger of snuffing out dissent from the San Francisco company Riot Group.

An elite company of marines is sent to assassinate a moustachioed Arab leader, but it soon becomes clear that the real target of the mission is one of its own, Private Jessica Stein, whose accusation of harassment has made the pages of the New York Times.

The writer, Adriano Shaplin, who took the template from The Dirty Dozen, one of George Bush's favourite films, says political theatre has never been more needed: "People will tell you it's passé - don't go all Noam Chomsky on us - but only theatre can react fast enough to examine the real meaning of events."

In Pugilist Specialist it is how America's new role of pre-emptive world policemen means asking its forces to act immorally or counter to their judgment.

"You can't fight lies with facts," Shaplin said. "The great weakness of liberal Americans, and liberals everywhere, is that they think if you just point out our leaders' lies that will do. But it doesn't work like that."

The nub of the issue, according to Shaplin, who studied the marine corps training regime before writing the play, is the soldiers themselves: "A lot of US marines serving in Iraq want Rumsfeld's head. They are mad at him, and feel that what they are doing is misdirected and wrong.

"One of the other great liberal tropes is that we can't blame the soldiers, but the soldiers too have a responsibility, and that is what this play is about."

The Iraqi-American Heather Raffo's show at the Traverse Theatre, Nine Parts of Desire, which puts US involvement in the country in its historical context through the stories of Iraqi women, also makes uncomfortable viewing for her compatriots.

Nor will the dozen transatlantic comedians who make the bravely named American Comedy Invasion be getting an invitation to the White House any day soon, given the relentless flow of Bush jokes.

But not all the Americans at Edinburgh are quite so willing to address what is being done in their name. Def Poetry Jam, a spoken-word show on its way to the West End from Broadway, may wear its radical chic credentials on its sleeve, but oddly it avoids the four-letter word Bush. Iraq is barely mentioned by the seven poets on stage, and then in the context of children stepping on landmines.

Osama guises

But comics, many of whom have steered clear of politics for years for fear of boring their audiences, have been piling in. Osama bin Laden is all over the Fringe in a variety of guises, from Andrew Dallmeyer's Wanted Dead or Alive, where he turns up in a Florida shopping mall, to Henry Naylor's satire Finding Bin Laden, based on a journalist's journey through Afghanistan.

A crop of Muslim comics led by the stand-ups Shazia Mirza and Shappi Khorsandi are also exploring Islamophobia. Jeff Mirza - no relation - impersonates a gallery of Arab bogeymen.

Shazia Mirza, who often opens her routine with the gag "My name is Shazia Mirza, or at least that is what is says on my pilot's licence", and sometimes threatens to blow herself up if the audience doesn't laugh, said she felt that new hostility first-hand when she toured the US.

She was held for two hours on arrival by immigration officers in San Francisco until her American promoter came to the airport to vouch for her. "They couldn't believe that there could be such a thing as a Muslim woman comic," she said. Ironically, it is a view shared by fundamentalists.

"They say it's not right for a Muslim woman to make jokes about these things. But the prophet himself used humour all the time. Muslims are allowed to be funny, and it not haram [forbidden] for females to be funny too."

As a woman, she said, she would never be able to get away with the impersonations of the radical cleric Abu Hamza and Saddam Hussein which are at the core of her namesake's act.

Domestic terrorism of a whiter and more anti-globalisation hue is examined in Vanessa Badham's play about a bomb attack on London, while Steve Waters' play English Journeys follows a Blairite couple whose relationship unravels as the New Labour project loses its way.

Waters believes England is approaching a "Rubicon of a kind that it hasn't faced since the early 1980s".

"We have begun to run out of words, everything sounds so hollow," he said. "The couple spend their lives in cars and increasingly they are driving through a country that has lost its centre and they don't recognise anymore."

As for the prime minister himself, the comic consensus is that he has been caught telling porkies.

As Lucy Porter, a hot tip for the Perrier shortlist, said: "You can really hear the six-year-old inside Tony Blair. He knows he has done wrong, but he is jumping up and down, shouting, 'No mummy, I didn't do it, I didn't!"

The shows that pack the punches

There is no escaping politics or the war on the Fringe. Here are the critics' tips for plays and comedians packing the biggest political punch:

The Straits by Gregory Burke at the Traverse Theatre.
Gibraltar, May 1982: as the Royal Navy taskforce approaches the Falklands, British teenagers on the Rock go into battle with the locals

Pugilist Specialist by Adriano Shaplin at the Pleasance Courtyard.
A crack unit of US marines is sent to assassinate a Middle Eastern leader with a very large moustache. But it is the truth, and the myth of American moral superiority, that end up in the crosshairs

The People Next Door by Henry Adam at the Traverse Theatre.
All Nigel wants to do is smoke dope and listen to Ms Dynamite until a renegade police officer pressgangs him into tracking down his terror suspect half-brother

English Journeys by Steve Waters at the Pleasance Courtyard.
A couple who have risen on the Blairite tide find that meaning and old certainties are ebbing away

Titus Andronicus at the Gateway.
Shakespeare's bloodfest is given a fresh spin by KAOS Theatre's production set in a newly militarised world

Shazia Mirza and Patrick Monahan at the Gilded Balloon Teviot.
Britain's best Muslim woman comic and its only Irish-Iranian-Geordie stand-up slay a herd of sacred cows and sensitive subjects, from suicide bombing to bearded Muslim ladies

Jeff Mirza in Walking with Muslims at the Smirnoff Underbelly.
Saddam Hussein and Comical Ali are reunited on a bill which also includes impersonations of the radical cleric Abu Hamza and the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay