Play: Stuff Happens

Overview
David Hare’s 2004 play Stuff Happens is a sweeping docudrama about the making of the 2003 Iraq War, dramatizing the months in which the United States and the United Kingdom moved from post‑9/11 resolve to the decision to invade. The title borrows Donald Rumsfeld’s casual remark about the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad, a phrase Hare uses as a refrain for the unintended consequences and moral evasions that shadow the enterprise. Premiered at London’s National Theatre, the play treats recent history as a history play: public figures speak words drawn from the record alongside imagined private exchanges that probe motive, pressure, and doubt.

Scope and Structure
The action spans from the shock of 9/11 through diplomatic maneuvering at the United Nations, culminating in the invasion and its immediate aftermath. Hare cuts briskly between Washington, London, and New York, interleaving cabinet rooms, press conferences, and quiet corridors. He frames the high-level story with voices from the ground, composite witnesses and Iraqi civilians, whose testimonies complicate the official narrative and remind the audience of the human stakes behind policy.

Principal Figures and Pivotal Moments
At the center is George W. Bush, portrayed not as a caricature but as a decisive leader who believes he is acting under a moral imperative. Around him cluster competing influences: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld urge regime change as both necessity and opportunity; Condoleezza Rice mediates and translates; and Colin Powell argues for restraint, law, and coalition. Powell’s arc is the play’s conscience, tracing his resistance to war without broad legitimacy to his fateful presentation to the Security Council, where he sets aside misgivings to make the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Across the Atlantic, Tony Blair emerges as Bush’s indispensable ally, determined to anchor action in international law and domestic consent. His scenes with advisers and parliament expose the strain of reconciling loyalty to Washington with sceptical Labour backbenchers and a mass anti-war movement. Hare stages the choreography of UN diplomacy, Resolution 1441, Hans Blix’s inspections reports, the eloquence of France’s Dominique de Villepin, showing how the search for a “second resolution” falters under time pressure and mistrust.

Once the war begins, the play compresses the early occupation into emblematic images: statues fall, ministries burn, and plans for postwar security prove thin. Rumsfeld’s “stuff happens” punctuates the gap between promises of precision and the unruly realities on the ground. The absence of discovered WMD hovers like a void, exposing the fragility of the narrative that justified war and the political costs of having believed it.

Themes and Perspectives
Hare’s central concern is how power persuades. The play interrogates the transformation of intelligence into certainty, the staging of public rhetoric to mask private doubt, and the erosion of multilateral norms under the pressure of preemption. It also complicates simple binaries: Iraqi exiles testify to Saddam Hussein’s brutality, even as others fear the chaos that follows liberation. Loyalty, both personal and national, is tested, Powell’s to his president, Blair’s to alliance and law, Bush’s to a moral clarity that admits little ambiguity.

Style and Effect
Hare blends verbatim quotation with plausible invention, refusing both satire and hagiography. Leaders are rendered fallible and intelligible, their convictions dramatized rather than mocked. The result is a lucid, fast-moving chronicle that invites the audience to weigh competing rationales and reckon with the consequences of decisions made in their name. Stuff Happens remains a probing account of recent history, capturing not only what was said and done, but the irresolvable tensions between prudence, principle, and power that shaped a war.