The Truth about Hoggett and Webb – review

Quote from the programme handed out to the audience by theatre attendants on the way into the theatre:

[snip]

Setting: The offices of Hoggett and Webb somewhere in the bowels of Whitehall.

Whilst the characters bear no relation to actual people, the events, the official quotes and the manipulations concerning the Iraq war are totally real. The events of the past four years take place in one day in the offices of Hoggett and Webb

There have only been a handful of theatre pieces about the war. And surprisingly even fewer about the British side of the story. So welcome to the world of Hoggett & Webb. The play will give an insight into the minds of hard working bureaucrats, the British establishment and how the government got away with fabricating a case for war.

This play is a chance to simplify those tangled and tortured arguments by laughing at the lies. It is also a chance to keep talking, because even though everyone has admitted there were no weapons of mass destruction, no-one has been held accountable. The factual information discussed in the play is real, the dossiers are directly quoted as are various reports. But the office of Hoggett and Webb does not exist. Allegedly.

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The play opens with two stereotypically British gentlemen, Mr Hoggett and Mr Webb, performing a veritable ballet of efficiency, procedure and paperwork. Sat at their desk with two old-fashioned typewriters, their communication with the outside world is by means of documents received and dispatched via the “message tube” (strangely reminiscent of the message tubes by which Winston Smith receives and dispatches his work in George Orwell’s novel “1984”). Watching them hand paperwork back and forth to each other across the desk, each time adding a receipt docket, an acknowledgement slip, etc, to the pile, and also seeing their thoroughly pedantic approach to tea (both the making of, and the timing of), this could easily be no more than a light-hearted pastiche of office bureaucracy. But as the play progresses, it becomes clear that it has a much more serious message, for one of the documents arriving through the message tube that morning is Tony Blair’s order to gather evidence to make a case for invading Iraq.

Mr Hoggett and Mr Webb sift through the evidence in order to compile their dossier. Finding that most of it does not support the case for war, they file it tidily under “Ignore”, until they come across one piece of evidence that a friend of someone’s friend’s granny’s brother-in-law (you get the idea) said something about some weapons which can be delivered to mobile units in between twenty minutes and three quarters of an hour. How flimsy is this evidence? Well, it’s written on toilet paper!

Undeterred, Mr Webb uses his fine creative and poetic skills to embellish this piece of evidence into the “dossier”, and deciding that three-quarters of an hour doesn’t sound frightening enough, enhances it into the infamous “Forty-Five Minutes”. After all, this is what Mr Webb is best at – it is his job and he’s good at it.

Whilst this is taking place, Miss Alesi arrives stage right. Sent by the EU to advise departments on modernising their working methods, she is most unwelcome in the office where Mr Hoggett and Mr Webb have worked together, alone, since the beginning of time. Not only is she disrupting their efficiency by being an extra person, but she is (horror of horrors) A Woman!

News comes via the message tube that Parliament has debated their dossier and voted in favour of war. Tensions rise in the office as Miss Alesi starts questioning the reliability of the evidence which was used to make the case for war (after all, it consisted of no more than a piece of tissue paper, embellished by Mr Webb’s creative skills). The questioning but normally obedient Mr Webb is increasingly beginning to think that they have done a great wrong, but Mr Hoggett maintains a firmly amoral stance, distancing himself from the rights and wrongs of the matter and stating that he is only doing his job and serving his country.

Under further pressure from Miss Alesi and Mr Webb, citing reports that more US soldiers have died since the war “ended” than whilst it was still officially happening, Mr Hoggett begins to recite rhetoric which will be familiar to Indymedia troll-watchers, accusing Miss Alesi of being a supporter of terrorists, who would prefer Iraq to have a brutal dictator rather than to have “freedom” and “democracy”, etc, etc, etc. Mr Hoggett also puts on an amazing display of doublethink, by claiming that it was necessary to remove Saddam because of the risk of WMD, whilst simultaneously acknowledging that the WMD scare was entirely made up in that very office, based on a single piece of flimsy evidence plus their own embellishments (after all, it’s their job to do it, and they do it well).



So what happens next? Well, I don’t want to spoil the plot for you, so I won’t tell you. You need to see the play for yourself to find out. And while you’re at it, bring your friends to watch it as well.