Theatre of the not so absurd

Tony Kushner couldn't have imagined how prescient 'Homebody/ Kabul', his play set in Afghanistan, would be, writes Paul Power

When Barry Levinson's film Wag The Dog was released in 1998, the parody of US military action in Kosovo and Albania seemed far-fetched - until Bill Clinton pulled the trigger. Until September 11th, Afghanistan was a country where Islamic fundamentalism had ridden roughshod over human rights but was conveniently, in the classic US wartime euphemism, "over there". So when the playwright Tony Kushner scripted a play set in Afghanistan, little did he know how prophetic his words were to become.

Homebody/Kabul, which opened last month at New York Theatre Workshop, on the Lower East Side, is a powerful and timely piece. Set in August 1998, around the time of Clinton's bombing of suspected terrorist training camps around Khost (the Bushes aren't the only bellicose first family), the "homebody" of the title is a middle-aged, middle-class Londoner, an avid reader who derives solace from books to counter the aridity of her joyless marriage.

Her discovery of a 1965 guide to Afghanistan - the same Historical Guide To Kabul that inspired Kushner to research and write about the country - takes her into a linguistic reverie and meditation on the inequities visited on it over the centuries. The stunning hour-long monologue, performed by Linda Emond, could stand on its own as a play, and it has already been performed in London as such, but is followed by two strident acts set in Kabul, in which the husband and daughter of the Homebody try to track her down after she disappears in the city.

Like the London productions of Kushner's Angels In America, Homebody/Kabul is directed by Declan Donnellan, a founder of Cheek by Jowl theatre company. The London-born director, whose parents come from Roscommon, describes his "volatile" working relationship with Kushner as akin to "a battle of two walruses on a South Atlantic beach - but he is a very beloved friend".

A meticulous rewriter, Kushner is notorious for the length of his plays, and Homebody/Kabul clocks in at nearly four hours, 60 minutes less than its original length.

"I was always really stage-struck as a kid," says Donnellan (48) after taking his cast through a mid-run rehearsal. "My first professional appearance was at Roscommon fair at the age of nine, when I won a medal for step-dancing. That was my last public appearance: I narrowly avoided becoming Michael Flatley."

An early experience that sparked a love of theatre was a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Dr Faustus that came to the Abbey, with Alan Howard as Mephistopheles. At about the same time he saw Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. After studying English and law at Cambridge and being called to the Bar - he still has his wig and gown from his six months as a barrister - he founded Cheek by Jowl in 1981 with Nick Ormerod, the designer whose impressive set for Homebody/Kabul evokes the ravaged city - "a populated disaster", as one character describes it.

Donnellan prides himself on Cheek by Jowl's anti-institutional stance. Operating as a touring company, it has staged a series of inventive productions of classics, including works by Racine, Ostrovsky, Corneille and Shakespeare - institutions of drama, perhaps, but freed from attachment to any organisation or edifice.

"There's always a problem with any institution, whether it's the IRA, the Catholic Church, the royal family or the BBC," says Donnellan. "Their stated objectives are not their number-one imperative, which is preservation of self. It's such a terribly difficult thing, because you need institutions in order to support art of some sorts, but then, very often, the institution actually stifles that spark of life.

"Dionysus" - the god of wine, who loosens inhibitions and inspires creativity - "is so removed from the centre of the world that we live in. People are very cautious, and lots of young actors I know now have mortgages at 24. I find I'm appalled at how responsible the young are becoming. It's a great weight of responsibility, and we seem to be gradually losing the will to disobey."

Most of the productions Donnellan has directed are from British, French or Spanish 17th-century plays - Kushner and Stephen Sondheim are his only living playwrights. Big, epic, poetic dramas are what attract him, as exemplified by the opening stage direction to Pushkin's Boris Godunov: "Enter the people of Moscow."

"The 17th century had that fantastic connection between the epic, poetic, spiritual, supernatural, sexual politics, state politics, religious politics, while always demanding that the audience exercise their imaginations and challenging the audience to suspend disbelief," says Donnellan.

"So two people pushing a saucer around the table, passing the sugar to each other - I don't think I'd do it very well, actually. It's just not my kind of thing; 17th-century plays all seem to go into that big public place, and I'm very happy there."

Kushner excoriated the McCarthy and Reagan eras in his pair of Angels In America plays, but this time he's more equivocal, less polemical. Although Homebody/Kabul recounts a litany of atrocities committed by the Taliban, it doesn't shy away from highlighting the battleground Afghanistan has become over the centuries, first as part of an empire, then as a colony. The play was in rehearsal for a late-September opening when the Pentagon and World Trade Centre were hit. Not a word was changed in response to the attacks, says Donnellan.

"My immediate reaction, and that of everybody in London, was: 'Well, of course they'll cancel the play.' So I phoned up a lot of my friends in New York and they said: 'Why would you ever do that? Life must go on.' I must say it has been unbelievably uncontroversial, as anti-Taliban as it is, and what's been so strange is how unstrange the atmosphere is in New York."

I tell him about the numerous references to the Blitz and the brave wartime citizenry of London in the aftermath of the attacks. How Churchill was quoted regularly and the mayor, governor and president urged a stiff upper lip, with little time allowed for grieving before going back to business as usual. "Ah yes," he says, smiling, "it's like in Jaws, where the evil mayor is throwing the swimmers into the ocean."

On the face of it, the second and third acts deal with the quest for a missing person on the streets of Kabul, but Kushner weaves socio-cultural, political and, ultimately, very human perspectives into the lush text. Quango Twistleton, a British foreign-aid official who is a depraved version of Lawrence Durrell's David Mountolive, emerges as the aide to Homebody's uptight husband, Milton Ceiling, and exacts a chilling price for cutting through some red tape; Milton's daughter, Priscilla, adopts a more guerrilla-style approach. With the aid of the 1965 guidebook and map, she enlists the help of a guide, a Tajik poet who promises to be "the cheapest family you ever had".

Besides English, Kushner unapologetically uses a Babel-like cacophony of French, German, Esperanto, Pashto (spoken by the Pashtuns) and Dari (an Afghan version of Farsi), all contributing to the confusion and irrationality that reigned under the Taliban, but illustrating a deeper, little-publicised fact about the depth of education of pre-Taliban Afghans.

In a frenetic railing against the tinkering by the West in Afghan matters, an educated Afghan woman screams how the US has caused hardship in her country by arming the mujahedin and, more recently, launching rocket attacks. Some of the audience wince when she spits: "Well, don't worry - they're coming to New York . . . Many among us would like to give you back your suffering."

Cheek by Jowl will be staging Homebody/Kabul in London later this year, but it's anyone's guess if the play will make it to Dublin (whose theatre-goers still fondly remember his all-male production of As You Like It at the 1990 theatre festival. "I'd love to come andwork in Dublin," says Donnellan. "I'd quite like to do Playboy there."

It's interesting that, while admitting a fondness for the work of Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness and Conor McPherson, the only Irish play he's directed is a 1988 production, Lady Betty, which he wrote about the legendary hangwoman of Roscommon jail.

"I think it's incredible what's happened to Ireland, and I think the big thing that's happened has been these two women presidents, which nobody can overestimate. One of the things that keeps Russia down is that it's got this obsession with the Russian soul.

"Russians have this myth of what it is to be Russian, like there used to be a myth of what it is to be Irish, but there seems to be some strange shedding of that in Ireland. It's all gone now, very quickly. I'm connected to an Ireland that's no longer there, and when I go back I can't find it any more."