HOW MANY MILES TO BASRA?
'"MALEK: What do you see against that dawn? On the horizon?
FREDDIE: Pylons. Electricity pylons.
MALEK: No, Mr Freddie, they are broken electricity pylons, broken because they have been bombed. Look, look, at the side of the road, burnt out cars. How many can we see from here? Five? Six? And I'd swear if you look close enough, you'll find the charred remains of 'ragheads' that even the vultures and the rats won't touch. To remove this monster Saddam, who you made to keep us in our place, you have bombed us, impoverished us, stood by and let our children die of the most preventable illnesses, starved us physically and intellectually, and then bombed us some more. You have destroyed our country. Take a good look at it, because when I look at its blasted remains, I see you. You reduce a country to rags, and then you call us ragheads.
Pause.
FREDDIE: I meant your turban thing.
MALEK: It's called a keffiyya! I have learnt your language, kindly take the trouble to learn this one word. And it might have escaped your notice, but I am not wearing one."
How Many Miles to Basra, Colin Teevan
Southern Iraq, April 2003. Four soldiers, a journalist and their Iraqi translator set off on an unauthorised journey deep into the Iraqi countryside in a disastrous attempt to make amends for the deaths of some local men at a vehicle checkpoint. An examination of how definitions of truth and responsibility become blurred in times of war - not just in the armed forces and political arena, but in the media too.
Production History
How Many Miles to Basra? was first commissioned and written as a radio play for BBC Radio 3 and broadcast on July 11th 2004. Producer Toby Swift.
How Many Miles to Basra was first produced for the stage on September 23rd 2006 at West Yorkshire Playhouse.
Directed by Ian Brown
Designed by Jeremy Daker
Press
On the BBC Radio 3 Broadcast:
as stark, shocking and terrifying as anything I’ve heard
"in its depiction of the soldiers, and their relationships with each other, the Iraqis they encounter, and the journalist travelling with them, Teevan's writing was grimly convincing. It didn't shy away from what the war has done to Iraq either." The Guardian
On the West Yorkshire Playhouse production:
How Many Miles To Basra?, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds
Murky morals in desert drama
By Lynne Walker
Published: 02 October 2006
If I were a soldier, out of my depth in a country whose terrain seemed riddled with danger, isolated from the rest of the squad and hopelessly ill-equipped to fight a desert war, the last person I'd want around would be a BBC reporter like Ursula. She's a feisty Irish girl with so much personal baggage that it would need a jeep - sorry lads, "rover" - to cart it around if it weren't tucked unsafely away in her head.
And if I were "Ma'am", as Ursula is addressed, I wouldn't loiter around any war zone with these four British soldiers. Trust them at a checkpoint? I wouldn't trust them at a supermarket check-out. Yet that's where we are, in Southern Iraq, April 2003, in Colin Teevan's khaki thriller (originally a radio drama) How Many Miles to Basra?. Having killed three innocent and unarmed Bedouins, the soldiers are in a mess. One victim survives long enough to tell them - as they ineptly try to stuff back his bleeding guts - that he's on his way to hand over blood money (ah, so that's why their boot was stashed with loot) to save his wife and child from the clutches of the evil Sheikh Kuffa.
The soldiers glean this only because useful Ursula has a smattering of Arabic. "Boss" Stewart McDonald decides to divert his little squad across the sands to Kabro a Generals to hand over the dosh and perform a madcap mission of mercy. He's actually doing it not so much to salve his conscience for the dead Bedouin as because he can't let go of his responsibility for the death of a girl in Northern Ireland.
Ursula, determined to get her big story, hires a driver (Kevork Malikyan as a sad and wily old Iraqi) and also sets off for the temple of the generals' grave. The paths of the two driving parties cross in an unlikely coincidence and, under a sun that beats relentlessly down, events inevitably begin to spiral out of control.
Led by Matthew Flynn as Sergeant McDonald, the soldiers are convincing, if a bit stereotypical, in characterisation, each shown to have his own reasons for being there in the first place. They reveal touching fragments of their lives and views, sometimes addressing the audience as if in a radio interview.
The acting is good and, as the soldiers' boyish banter degenerates into fearful aggression and crumbling morale, each new situation provokes an increasingly personal and often highly charged response. Flora Montgomery, as Ursula, is a splendidly driven reporter, eventually arousing sympathy for her doggedness, whatever her actual motives.
Ian Brown's excellent production owes much to Jeremy Daker's effective set. Sliding walls of shattered glass, a shimmering backcloth on which are variously projected broken pylons, the skeletal outline of a city, a rosy desert mirage and a heap of rubble, are both realistic and curiously dream-like.
Ursula's story is framed by her encounters at Broadcasting House where, in the aftermath of the Gilligan affair over the "sexing up" of a dossier, her BBC colleagues have been marched into a strait-jacket by scaredy-cat governors. Her slippery producer contact (Emilio Doorgasingh) - a smooth-tongued, self-centred executive - is more absorbed with covering his back than in whether or not she has a good story, or even reveals "the greater truth".
The dilemma at the heart of Teevan's drama is the definition of truth and morality in war. The issues of responsibility and morality in the army, in politics and in the media are turned over, kicked around, but ultimately and rightly left unresolved in this gripping battle for hearts and minds a few miles from Basra.
To 21 October (0113-213 7700)
Dominic Cavendish
Luckily for the people of Leeds, there's more challenging fare next door at the Courtyard Theatre where [Ian] Brown directs a gripping play by Colin Teevan on the theme of getting lost in Iraq.
Presented on a landscape of sand and ruins, How Many Miles to Basra? begins as a simple fictional account of how, just after the 'cessation of hostilities' in 2003, a group of British soldiers go off the beaten track in life-threatening search of a sheikh who is owed 'blood money' by a Bedouin they've mistakenly shot dead.
As things go horribly awry, though, and the team wind up demoralised, dehydrated and disorientated in a sandstorm, the parallels with the liberation/occupation of Iraq as a whole become inescapable.
The cast are superlative; we see the Westerners almost as they might be seen by sympathetic but suffering Iraqis - twitchy, flawed but not unlikeable.
Teevan uses all the devices of a modern thriller to steer the action towards a symbolic destination: the desert shrine known as Kabro a Generals, established as a mausoleum by Alexander the Great in a previous western attempt to effect a regime change. . . .
It is a bold piece of commissioning, and Ian Brown's production is full of admirable detail. Among a clutch of strong performances, Matthew Flynn as the troubled officer, Flora Montgomery as the tenacious journalist and Kevork Malikyan as the translator are all outstanding. There were quite a few shell-shocked faces on the way out.
In a vital and damning world premiere, the Playhouse tackles the topic du jour, the Iraqi conflict, in How Many Miles To Basra?
Colin Teevan's searing play began life on the radio and now he has developed it for a stage production directed by Playhouse artistic director Ian Brown, a friend from Edinburgh days.
The Courtyard Theatre stage has been stretched to the maximum by Jeremy Daker's aptly disorientating desert design. Bright sand, useless, broken slats and slashed and wind-blasted blinds combine with Guy Hoare's intense lighting to wage a relentless assault on the senses, not only of the British soldiers struggling in southern Iraq but of the audience too.
The date is April 2003; BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan has stirred up a hornet's nest with his infamous early morning report, and British soldiers are "keeping the peace" in Iraq with shoddy equipment and over-stretched leadership.
Loose-cannon Irish reporter Ursula (Flora Montgomery) wants to tell their story - with its shades of American soldiers sinking in the alien mire of Vietnam - against the background of Government lies, military misinformation and a nervous BBC, put on edge by the Gilligan affair.
Feisty, wilful and independent-spirited, yet needing to nurture a relationship with the 3rd Royal Fusiliers, she travels with four soldiers and Malik, an Iraqi translator, on a calamitous unauthorised journey with shattering consequences.
Where Kevork Malikyan's Malek is the sage Shakespearean Fool; Teevan's soldiers are in a mess: Gareth Farr's Freddie is a racist, sexist hard nut; Gwilym Havard Davies's Dangermouse is callow; and Matthew Flynn's commanding officer, Stewart, is losing it. Stuck on foreign fields, their clarity of purpose has blurred to the point of calling all Iraqis "ragheads". Likewise, where do the margins of truth lie for journalist Ursula; is she driven by zeal or a mere desire for career advancement?
Direction, performances and writing are all top notch in this stark, dark night of a zeitgeist play.
 > dated 14 October 2006 | issue 2022
Flora Montgomery as Ursula and Kevork Malikyan as Malek (Pic: © West Yorkshire Playhouse)
Christian Hogsbjerg writes on the latest play to look at the realities facing soldiers in Iraq
How Many Miles To Basra? focuses on a unit of four British soldiers in occupied Iraq during the immediate aftermath of the war. This play portrays the moral dilemma facing British soldiers sent to fight in Iraq - how to reconcile doing “your job” with doing “the right thing” when the two are irreconcilable.
Playwright Colin Teevan has said that back in March 2003 he trusted Tony Blair on the question of weapons of mass destruction. However, by the time this play was written and first broadcast on Radio 3 in 2004, it had inevitably became about more than simply the experience of those at the sharp end of the conflict.
Issues of truth and justice are explored through telling the story of Ursula, an ambitious journalist. She is a BBC war reporter who becomes “embedded” with the unit at a time when Iraq is already being considered “old news” by her bosses after the supposed liberation of the country.
On her return to Britain, her boss dismisses her story as unreliable and irrelevant.
The play effectively brings the bloody everyday reality of the business of empire home to its audience. After a criminal blunder sees the unit kill three innocent Iraqis, Ursula hires an Iraqi driver to follow them as they try not only to cover up the murder but also make amends by going off on a secret mission of their own.
Indeed, the play’s graphic and harrowing depiction of those sent to do the actual fighting raises questions not only about the present - in Afghanistan as well as Iraq - but also the past.
The unit’s sergeant is ridden with guilt from his time spent stationed in Ireland. One of the most powerful aspects of the play is the way in which the soldiers casual racist demonisation of Arabs - inevitable in any Western “civilising mission” - is effectively undermined as the real history of imperialism in the Middle East and Iraq is brought in.
The voices of ordinary Iraqis are not absent either - the British troops are told by one that “to remove this monster Saddam, who you made to keep us in our place, you have bombed us, impoverished us, stood by and let our children die of the most preventable illnesses, starved us physically and intellectually, and then bombed us some more you reduce a country to rags, and then you call us ragheads”.
Overall, outstanding acting ensures this well-researched and well-written play succeeds in vividly portraying those soldiers sent to kill in our name, and apparently for our safety.
While not without humour, the subject matter means this is never comfortable viewing. It is necessary viewing, nonetheless, for every anti-war activist who has the opportunity to see it.
HOW MANY MILES TO BASRA?
Posted By ANDREW LIDDLE
Date Posted 9/29/2006 |
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UK Theatre Network
The world premiere production of Colin Teevan's 'How Many Miles to Basra?', at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, is not to be missed under any circumstances.
If you want a night of remorseless, over-powering tension, this is it. The scene, in Southern Iraq, is exposed to the bone in Designer Jeremy Daker's sand-filled wastes, littered with the impedimenta of war, desolate and formless.
What is truth in time of war? Those who people this nomadic world search for it but do not find it. Truth is exigency; different for everybody.
Matthew Flynn's platoon leader, Stewart, has been taken over by an emotion stronger than his will. Truth is atonement; leading his men across the desert to play bood money to save an Iraqi woman he has never met - in his mind the woman he shot in Northern Ireland, whose picture he carries. For Freddie - Gareth Farr's lippy sergeant - the big question is 'what the f*** are we doing here?' Virgin soldier Geordie, played by Scott Turnbull, knows truth to be the number of warnings he gave an Iraqi before shooting him.
Dangermouse (the redoubtable Gwilym Havard Davies) is trying to determine if Stewart has lied to them, 'deliberately misled us, knowingly like'. According to Flora Montgomery's gutsy Ursula, the journalist from Northern Ireland and the play's central consciousness, the truth is as she reports it, not the spin the MoD chooses to put on it. Kevork Malikyan is wily and perceptive as Malek, the Iraqi guide and translator, who knows the sad reality is that 'the new Iraq will be a knockdown shop for the West'.
Under Ian Brown's strong direction, what these characters go through is an amazing experience with horror round every corner of the dirty, degraded, post-Saddam hell. And a point eventually arrives when the only truth worth knowing is to be found in those interstellar surges of light that have guided elemental man across the desert for ever.
Trouble is there's a distinct absence of weapons of mass destruction, which means they're on a sticky wicket in London, the spinners are toiling, and who knows where the truth lies! |
Publications
The radio script of How Many Miles to Basra? is available on the web at BBC Writersroom. Click here and follow the links.
The stage play of How Many Miles to Basra? is published by Oberon Books. To order a copy, click here.
Credits All Photos on this page by Keith Pattison |
