The Play's the Thing

David Hare's Stuff Happens is a must see at the Public Theatre. Infuriating, sickly satiric, accurate, fictional, imaginative. You're left with a feeling of hopelessness.

"A friend of mine said that, ultimately, the play is about the sadness of power," Hare says. "It's really the story of how a supposedly stupid man, George (W.) Bush, got everything he wanted out of an operation, and Blair, a supposedly clever man, was destroyed by it. Blair is an intelligent, sensitive and very gifted man; he knows he'll never recover. And there is something desolating about having the thing you do never turn out to be the thing you so wanted to do. That's a great theme — it's a Shakespearean theme."