Although we did not want to use the name Iraq in our piece, as this may have been distasteful, we made it obvious by the characters that we included, and certain design elements, that it was set in the Eastern part of the world. As we knew that the audience would be aware of Iraqi conflict, we knew that these subtle additions would cause them to assume that we had set certain parts of the play in this area.
A large proportion of our research was carried out using newspaper clippings and other media material that we had gathered from the Internet. However, we realised that in doing our research this way meant that although we were using our play to comment upon the failings of the West, we were in fact using their work and information to influence the content of our play. This created a quite a unique problem in the sense that as a culture we have very little understanding of the ways of the East, and as there is such little reliable or relevant literature on the subject, we were forced to use information that was quite likely to be bias and untrue. This was unavoidable. We had to accept the fact, that as we were commenting on current events, we would have to accept a degree of social and cultural bias to be involved in our work, however unintentional. As playwrights, this added a sense of irony to our work. Drama after all is a form of media, and what gives us the right to say that our work should be accepted over a journalist’s? It seemed quite apt to be criticising our work in the same way that we would anyone else’s.
This disconnection with Eastern culture extends from not only the media, but as a society we have grown to distrust area of the world. After the bombing of the World Trade Centre, this distrust has become even more extreme. In order to communicate this, we placed relatively normal characters in this hostile environment so to see effects. These characters took the form of our journalists. With these were able to show a modern, western opinion, to this apparently ‘alien’ culture. This was clearly during our ‘translation’ scene, which saw the racist patronisation of our male reporter, Danny. By scripting the dialogue between the three characters in the scene we showed the cultural preconceptions that are found so frequently between our cultures.
The topical content of our eastern based scenes was juxtaposed by the inclusion of scenes which depicted a much more ‘conventional’ form of warfare, specifically, our interpretation of a World War One trench. This was our first scene and it was placed so early so to show the audience a war situation that they would be familiar with because of its frequent appearance in films. The use of the past and present examples of warfare allowed us to show a changing attitude to war. As our play proceeded we began using less and less obvious examples of warfare, and this was used so to represent the idea of how difficult it is to classify ‘war’. When we first began discussing the theme of war, we instantly thought of our classic trench situation, and so we wanted to use a number scenes set in this era so to mirror the much more modern events of other scenes. For example, in our advertisement scene we showed a full hearted and proud view of the British armed forces, protecting King and country from the threat of ‘darkies’. This was took a comical look at attitudes to new technology, and as the characters had lines which were talking about the changing face of war, we were making references to the suicide bomber’s conviction, that he was in fact the new face of war.
Similarly, we also depicted the brutal murder of a man within his home. Although this scene would not have obviously been connected with war if placed by itself, in the context of scenes around it we were able to show the audience its relevance to the play. We were ever conscious during this play that we should be making references and connections between different aspects of war, and by showing different attitudes affected by the social, cultural historical elements we would be able to show the similarities off all wars across historic and cultural divides.
