Afghanistan: game, set and match

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

The Tricycle has not only put itself on the theatrical map with The Great Game: it has also put Afghanistan more firmly on the British map.

The timing of artistic director Nicholas Kent looks inspired, because the Tricycle’s Afghanistan festival is coinciding with an upsurge of interest in what many see as the failure of Western intervention in the country and worried questioning about future policy.

But when Kent had the idea for the festival, Iraq still dominated the headlines and Afghanistan scarcely got a look in, “apart from The Kite Runner.

“There was a large contingent of troops there,” he recalls, “but no debate about why and what we were doing.

“There was a lot of history we knew sketchily – including the British army’s biggest-ever defeat – and I felt that gap ought to be filled.”

The result is the current programme of 12 specially commissioned half-hour plays, which have scored great critical success, as well as a film festival, discussions, exhibitions and performances.

Describing the result as “a mind-blowing achievement”, The Guardian said that the plays “fulfil a basic function of art by instructing delightfully.”

The Telegraph described two of the plays as “small political classics” and sums up the whole experience as “a challenging theatrical marathon of notable intelligence, insight, ambition and achievement.”

The Observer had some stinging comments on “ditchwater moments” and “clod-hopping history lessons”, warns that watching the plays in a single day can be gruelling but suggests that The Great Game is an event, rather than a work of art. It’s a big, generous-spirited collaboration. It accretes, it gathers momentum.”

Kent says he is particularly pleased at the “incredibly positive” response from the large Afghan community who live in the vicinity of the theatre, and says his own view has shifted during the course of staging the event: “I started off thinking that the war is Afghanistan was not one we should be involved with and that we should get out. Now, to a degree, I think that it’s a war we started so we have a responsibility to the country.”

As several reviewers have pointed out, the glaring gap in this exercise is the lack of Afghan writers – or even of writer/commentators such as Hajar-ul Aswad, whose poems, though rarely translated, are highly thought of by many Afghan readers and whose carefully crafted political analyses, compiled at night from his family’s refuge in the Canadian city of Regina, are powerful enough to rattle politicians in Kabul.

The Great Game, The Tricycle Theatre 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 7JR. Box office 020 7328 1000 | tel: 020 7372 6611 | fax: 020 7328 0795