SOURCE: Steyn, Mark. “Goin' to Afghanistan.” New Criterion 20, no. 6 (February 2002): 35.

[In the following review of Homebody/Kabul, Steyn comments that the characters are not well developed, the plot is unfocused, and the play lacks a clear sense of purpose.]

There was an extraordinary picture in Newsweek the other day of some ferocious bearded warriors. They turned out to be Green Berets dropped in Afghanistan early in the war to liaise with anti-Taliban forces. All thirty-something, trained as soldiers, emergency workers, horsemen, and linguists, they speak at least four languages and on the ground muddled through with Arabic for the first few days until they picked up a working knowledge of Dari and Pashto. Some of them were seen in, I think, Kandahar shortly after liberation, enjoying a game of buzkashi with the natives. Buzkashi is the local equestrian sport played with a headless calf that the rider has to scoop off the ground and tuck under his arm. American special forces playing buzkashi: that's what I call multiculturalism in action.

It's easy to patronize soldiers, and our “artists” do it more easily than most, which is why those Green Berets are so startling: if a special forces commando turns up in an American play, chances are he won't be a multilingual sophisticate but a psychopath with a buzz cut. It is a given that in our society the artist holds a special status by virtue of his unique insight: that's why channel surfing in almost any western nation in the last four months you can stumble across a panel of novelists, poets, choreographers, and playwrights discussing the slaughter of September 11th and the war in Afghanistan. No one would think of convening a panel of soldiers to discuss the current off-Broadway season. But maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. While Green Berets speak Dari and play buzkashi, America's playwrights have mostly retreated from the world, to a short checklist of familiar obsessions—growing up black in America, growing up gay in America, growing up gay in black America, etc.

This is where Tony Kushner comes in. Whatever else may be said, he's not parochial. Lots of guys were writing AIDS plays, but he decided to write the AIDS epic, and so, whatever one feels about it, Angels in America is the AIDS play, the play of the AIDS era. One reason for its success is that, in contrast to the authors of most AIDS plays, Kushner, though gay and a playwright, is not “a gay playwright” In these pages a few years ago, I compared him to David Belasco. Like Belasco with Madam Butterfly, he has an eye for the big subject, the broader canvas. The first Kushner play I saw, even before Angels in America, was Slavs!, a vaudeville peopled by gnarled old babushkas and the like rifting on the fall of Russian Communism. Put aside for a moment his views on the great issues of our time and give him credit for being engaged with the world in a way few other American dramatists are.

And now he and his remarkable sense of timing have pulled off their most ingenious coup de theatre yet. Homebody/Kabul (produced at the New York Theatre Workshop) was written well before September 11th and so has been credited for its almost eerie prescience, especially one line which seems like pure prophecy. An educated Afghan woman, blaming America for her country's oppressors, says, “You love the Taliban so much, bring them to New York. Well, don't worry, they're coming to New York. America!,” she snorts. I reckon Kushner got lucky here, but, on the strength of that line, he's now being hailed as even more of a genius than he was previously. He's not, and he doesn't have to be. Three years ago, Kika Markham (the wife of Corin Redgrave and sister-in-law of Vanessa—please, no groans) asked Kushner to write her a monologue. He mulls it over, puts the map up in the operations room, and sticks a little pin in the Khyber Pass. Amazing. The biggest change across the century is that where once the ambitious writer thrust outward to the distant horizon now he looks inward, sunk in introspection. Not Kushner. He didn't foresee the scale of September nth, but then neither did the CIA or FBI. What he did do, as he worked and reworked his play from 1998 onwards, was identify the principal tributaries leading up to that dam burst: his script is woolly, wordy, and circuitous, but within its pages you'll find an awful lot about Afghan history, a little about Islamic culture, and a soupcon about the West's relationship to both. And, if you don't care for his take on these subjects (as some conservative critics don't), why blame Kushner? It's not his fault that there's no alternative view available on the New York stage: the fact is that, in the years since the Soviet retreat and the Taliban's rise and Osama's opening forays, no other working playwright thought any of these themes were worth writing about. What a place the New York theater would be if more writers could raise their eyes from their navels to the world, to embrace the big sweep of history. A decade or so back, in odd moments at London dinner parties, you could catch the various socialist colossi of Britain's subsidized theatrical establishment marveling at how they'd managed to miss completely the biggest story of the age—the fall of Communism. But in New York the irrelevance—the absence of anything to say—appears not even to have been felt, never mind acknowledged. Only Tony Kushner was curious enough to want to write a play about Afghanistan.

So take it as read that the motivation for that coming-to-New-York speech is a tiresome leftie's generic critique of his own country. Be aware, too, that this play is also very long-winded. Staged by Declan Donellan, the director of Angels's London production, Homebody/Kabul is a sprawling, languorous four hours, including passages in Pashto, French, Esperanto, and maybe a couple of languages I missed. Kushner never justifies the length for what is, narrative-wise, an underplotted and unresolved Agatha Christie on the North-West Frontier. But I see that even in disparaging it I've made it sound quite appealing, which it is.

Homebody/Kabul is divided into two sections: Homebody is an hour-long monologue delivered by the eponymous heroine in Britain; Kabul is a three-act play set in the eponymous capital after the Homebody has disappeared and her family has begun looking for her. Linda Emond's opening lines are riveting. “Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3000 B.C.,” she starts, and then explains: “I am reading from an outdated guidebook about the city of Kabul. In Afghanistan. In the valleys of the Hindu Kush mountains. A guidebook to a city which we all know, has … undergone change.” The Homebody is at home in London, a garrulous English matron in pearls and cardigan, gushing over a travel guide from 1965, the last good time in Afghanistan, the final decade of King Zahir's reign. She speaks for the most part in long formal ornate meandering tapeworms of sentences, a cross between Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India and one of those rococo-erudite Afghan or Pakistani cabinet ministers who pop up on CNN to confound the anchors. When she lapses into the giddier sentiments of her own place and time, she sounds less convincing: “Oh, I love the world!,” she trills. “I love love love love the world!” You'll have guessed she's on antidepressants, her own and her husband's.

Homebody is a piece of one-act exhibitionism by Kushner: he does it because he can, and he's been rewarded by glowing reviews in which even critics who dislike the ensuing three hours coo over the depth of character and command of language and “dreamlike quality” of this opening section. By this, they mean you have a tendency to nod off, as odd fragments from Afghanistan's Fascinating Fact File emerge and retreat and circle around each other and Linda Emond at times audibly struggles, not so much with the British accent as with the dilemma of being someone with a British accent speaking with an Afghan voice. As she reads, her stream of consciousness flows off into digressions, about hats, ten pacooli hats made by a fingered Afghan whom she meets in a London store. Kushner's maimed milliner captures very well both the cadences of Asian English and the almost genetic Afghan ambivalence to everything:

It was hard work to get into the UK. I am happy here in the UK. I am terrified I will be made to leave the UK. I cannot wait to leave the UK. I despise the UK. I voted for John Major. I voted for Tony Blair. I did not, I cannot vote, I do not believe in voting, the people who ruined my hand were right to do so, they were wrong to do so, my hand is most certainly ruined, you will never understand, why are you buying so many hats?

Suddenly the English lady finds she can speak fluent Pashto, and, in her medication-fueled imagination, is whisked away by the hatseller to Kabul, where he makes love to her under a Chinar tree. The lovemaking over, she pays for her hats and leaves. The monologue ends with her singing along to Frank Sinatra's “It's Nice to go Trav'ling,” a typical bit of Fifties pop exotica that sounds slightly dotty today:

It's very nice to just wander
The camel route to Iraq
It's oh so nice to just wander
But it's so much nicer
Yes it's oh so nice to wander back.

I'll say. But not the Homebody. No sooner has she finished her singalong, then she gives us Sammy Cahn's sentiments through Persian eyes, a seventeenth-century poem on the raptures of the Afghan capital: “I sing to the gardens of Kabul./ Even Paradise is jealous of their greenery.”

On the same album as “It's Nice to go Trav'ling,” Come Fly with Me, Sinatra also recorded that great staple of British Empire concert parties “On the Road to Mandalay,” but in a swinging Billy May arrangement flail of interpolated Frankisms:

Ship me somewhere east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst
And there ain't no Ten Commandments
And a cat can raise a thirst.

Kipling's daughter so disliked this take she managed to get it banned throughout the Commonwealth. But, whether serendipitously or otherwise, Kushner has hit upon a kind of Sinatrafied Kipling. East is East and West is West and the twain do meet in all manner of odd ways. Under the Taliban, all tunes Eastern or Western were banned, and so the potency of cheap music is all the more potent. The hat man longs to hear his English customer's Sinatra CD:

Ah, beautiful song that will not die, stardust of yesterday, music of years gone by. Who may solve its mystery? Why shall it make a fool of me? Some few of these LPs my parents—may they have the perfect happiness of Paradise—have leave to me when they are dead, some I have myself to buy at souks in Egypt, Ashkabad, Tashkent, Alma-Ata, airplane tickets to romantic places, yes? They go to extremes with impossible dreams, yes? And so my record player is smashed and all each of the LPs of me, Popular Frank Sinatra Sings For Moderns. … Slips through a door a door marked nevermore that was not there before. It is hard you will find to be narrow of mind.

Very nice. An Afghan speech constructed from American song lyrics—“Stardust” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” “These Foolish Things.” Even the album title is well-chosen—Frank Sinatra Sings For Moderns—for what could be more provocative to a regime at war with modernity? And once shattered, the past is impossible to rebuild: “A door marked nevermore/That wasn't there before.”

That's Johnny Mercer from “Days of Wine and Roses.” “It is hard you will find / To be narrow of mind” is Carolyn Leigh from “Young at Heart.” Of course, if you're a Talib, it's not in the least bit hard to be narrow of mind. There's something very touching about a Sinatra-spouting Afghan retaining so many casual baubles of Tin Pan Alley whose easy rhymes encapsulate for him a whole world of lost promise.

For Kushner, the man represents a global pidgin culture, a world in which the great civilizations have not fused their glories but degraded each other. “All must be touched” says the Homebody. “All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted.” Afghanistan is Kushner's case study: a put-upon land designated as a playing field for great-power rivalry, from the Moguls to the Russians to the British to the Soviets to the “American-backed” Taliban. There is a fevered summary of recent millennia. The British “seize” India. Hardly. Though the SAS commandos currently scouring Tora Bora are engaged in what's technically Britain's Fourth Afghan War, the previous three were comparatively short and, for the civilian population, relatively non-disruptive. If you'd been born in Afghanistan in 1887 and died there in 1973, you would have passed a long life in one of the most undisturbed corners of the planet—at least when compared to Germany or China, Russia or Japan, Ethiopia or Serbia.

But Kushner is not primarily interested in the world's impact on Afghanistan. A Pashtun with a pash on tunes by Sinatra is a jest, a conceit unlikely to be found anywhere between Bost and Kandahar. Kushner is more preoccupied by the Orient's impact on his Occidentals. By making his Westerners British, he's concocted a contemporary Kipling rematch: West and East, English and Pashtun, out on the North-West Frontier locked in a sordid reductio of the Great Game. The cosy English domestic setting (well conjured by the designer Nick Ormerod) is replaced by a shattered-brick set. We are in a Kabul hotel room, where the Homebody's husband and daughter are holed up trying to find out what's happened to her. It seems that, after her Afghan fantasy of Act One, she decided to go to Kabul for real. She went out for a stroll forgetting her burqa and accompanied only by forbidden Frank on her CD Walkman. What has happened to her? According to one version, she's been murdered by an anti-Western mob. This is 1998, just after Bill Clinton's diversionary raid on an empty al-Qaeda camp, when as Mr. Bush drolly put it he fired a ＄2 million missile at a ＄10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It seems unlikely this would generate much “anti-Westernism” As the liberation of Kabul demonstrated, the Afghans didn't invest a lot of national pride in what was essentially a regime of colonial oppression, funded by Saudis and staffed by impressionable Pakistanis, Scots, and Californians. The other theory is that the Homebody has renounced her British identity and gone native, as the spouse of a good Muslim.

There's a vague familiarity to everything the minute we're in the hotel room. This is Graham Greene territory—expats, ethics, intrigue—and, either as in-joke or hommage, Kushner even gives one of the locals the same former occupation as Our Man In Havana: he was a salesman of vacuum cleaner parts. The Westerners are the Homebody's hubby Milton Ceiling (Dylan Baker), their adult daughter Priscilla (Kelly Hutchinson), and, since the British severed diplomatic relations, a kind of honorary consul-cum-aid-worker called Quango Twistleton (Bill Camp). “Twistleton” is one of those slightly twitty English names, being one third of the triple-barrel of the British explorer Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wyckham-Fiennes. “Quango” sounds like P. G. Wodehouse but is in fact a British acronym, standing for Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization. As an aid worker with various ancillary activities, Quango is literally his own QUANGO. He is the stereotypical seedy expat, even his opium addiction heady with the whiff of nostalgia. True, he puts Priscilla's knickers on his head and masturbates, which Somerset Maugham might have balked at. Milton is something in computers and loathes Priscilla. Priscilla, who got knocked up at eighteen and tried to kill herself, is a foul-mouthed harridan.

If Osama bin Laden met these three specimens in Kabul, mired as they are in a swamp of booze, drugs, and joyless sex, they would no doubt confirm all his fiercely held views on Western decadence. If there's any point to the exhaustive repulsiveness of the British half of the dramatis personae, it would seem to be that Kushner is inverting the perspective of traditional Imperial drama: the English are the primitive exotics, the Afghans are cultured, educated, artistic, urbane, articulate, poets, and librarians, masters of all the virtues the metropolitan power once claimed for itself. I found this argument, if such it is, somewhat undermined by the casting. The natives are mostly played by Asian-Americans—an odd distinction as Afghans are Caucasian, and Asian-Americans are mostly from Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc. The only one who struck me as plausibly Afghan was the lady who gives that warning to New York, and she's played by a Briton—Rita Wolf, a British-Asian actress born in India who was in the film My Beautiful Laundrette fifteen years ago and has struggled to find prominent roles since. Miss Wolf's is the performance that stays with you—frenzied, gripping and disturbing, a Muslim librarian unhinged by life under the Taliban. “I have nothing to read!” she wails.

But this is thin reward for a four-hour investment. Kushner lacks Greene's interest in moral crisis, and no one seems to care very much about what happened to the Homebody, so it's hardly surprising we don't. Though we spend a long evening with these people, Miss Wolf's librarian is the only one who truly lives. The rest seem unformed, sketches for a play yet to be written.

So you come away feeling oddly cheated. Unlike Kim or John Buchan's Greenmantle or any other standard piece of Imp Lit, the world of Homebody/Kabul never seems to exist on its own terms. The characterizations and plot are full of holes: one lengthy subplot concerns a Muslim husband trying to figure out a way to get rid of his first wife. Say what you like about the Taliban, but that's one thing that's not a problem over there. And, even as emblems of all that is most sordid and pitiful about the West, Kushner's Brits are unsatisfactory: nobody here is as ghastly or “culturally insensitive” as Yvonne Ridley, the real-life Fleet Street hackette arrested by the Taliban, who kept moaning to her captors that she'd kill for a chilled Chardonnay. Back in London, she spent a fortnight cranking out a book about her experiences that reads like Bridget Jones's Afghan Diary. Modern Britons may indeed be as awful as Kushner says, but not usually so dull.

As for the history, the context, the big questions, the “root causes,” they're all in there somewhere or other, alluded to on this page, back-referenced on that, but not in a way that invites us to re-think our preconceptions. At one level, it's puzzling: One of the reasons why the left's “peace movement” got nowhere after September nth was because they were obvious know-nothings, the lame generalities of their demo placards untroubled by anything so tiresome as a verifiable fact about the region. Here, in contrast, is a left-wing playwright who's taken the trouble to unearth ten-thousand facts and yet in the end has as little to say as the ignoramuses. Homebody/Kabul has a handful of piercing vignettes in search of a drama. As a playwright, Tony Kushner knows where to go but not what to do when he gets there.