Review: Occupational Hazards (Hampstead Theatre)
Oppressive concrete walls stand bleak and bleached. Ripe for strafing, you'd think. Yet this solid, windowless environment designed by Paul Wills quickly reveals a nifty side, and for a hundred hectic minutes it slides and snakes at a pace that undercuts the initial impression of crumbling permanence.
So, in its way, does the play that Stephen Brown has fashioned from Rory Stewart's memoir of his time as a greenhorn diplomat in post-conflict Iraq. Occupational Hazards is as slick as its title: a fast drama on a grim subject that's so anxious to hold its audience it ladles on the epigrams. Some earn grim nods of recognition "every election opens the door to extremists"; others play to stereotypes – "You can't have democracy in the country when you have tyranny in the home".
Stewart, now a Tory MP up for re-election, was an intrepid thirty-something in 2003 when he went to Iraq and presented himself as an intellectual for hire. He hustled the job of acting governorate coordinator in Maysan and found himself embroiled in the delicate internal politics of a culture whose customs he barely understood. Part Lawrence of Arabia, part Mr Bean, he fumbled his way through negotiations with two proud Islamic foes in a vain attempt to put their house in order.
Stewart's father had instilled in him the mantra "Stop making decisions and you're dead", but by the play's end we're likely to wish his son had made rather fewer. In the event he did less harm than he might have done, but, as Brown's play demonstrates, his insistence on British values of tea-and-marmalade diplomacy did little to change the world.
As a drama, Occupational Hazards overfills its pint pot. Brown, Stewart's longtime friend, seems reluctant to omit anything of substance so, rather than shape a focused drama from the material, he clutters it with facts and real people. Little has been refashioned for the theatre, even though there are times when fiction is able to depict truth better than truth itself. This should have been one such. A tighter focus on the antagonistic pair of Karim (Silas Carson) and Seyyed Hassan (Johndeep More) would draw the attention and create a suspense that never quite surfaces in the play as written.
It's not documentary theatre, however. Brown's short, fast-flowing scenes have a cinematic sweep that director Simon Godwin catches shrewdly in his tightly organised production, although the payback for this is that some figures are barely characterised. Of the ten actors who carry the show, at least four are under-used.
Vincent Ebrahim plays a contrasting pair of roles as a police chief and a university professor, and Aiysha Hart is a strong presence as the almost-emancipated Rana, but it's Henry Lloyd-Hughes as a cocky, stumbling Rory Stewart who holds centre-stage, as he must. When he addresses the audience, which he does pretty much throughout, his asides are played like a nervous tic. And despite all the failures he succeeds in depicting a man who never stops learning.
By the end, though, it's unclear what good, if any, Stewart has done. "We arrive thinking we're superheroes. We leave…" So do we, none the wiser.
Occupational Hazards runs at Hampstead Theatre until 3 June.
