Beyond Fallujah

Postcard Review by Caroline Russell-King

Show – Beyond Fallujah

Playwright– Writer Patrick Graham

Production Company/Theatre space – One Yellow Rabbit, High Performance Rodeo / Engineered Air Theatre, Werklund Centre

Length – 90 minutes

Genre/s – Reading from memoir

Premise – A journalist shares his life story, the risks he took to get the story in Iraq during Bush’s “Shock & Awe” campaign, and his adventures reporting and interviewing terrorists and insurgents during the war.

Why this play? Why now? – Not, a play, but enthralling inside stories from a brave, intelligent, articulate, and lauded writer whose material is both historic and (sadly) relevant.

Curiosities – He wrote The Man Who Went to War – a missed opportunity for a book signing and sales? Was the blurb in the program written by AI? It seems to have missed the mark. What of this could be adapted for the stage?

Notable Moment – Bomb blasts.

Notable writing – This is sophisticated writing at a level far above most of the playwrights in Canada, me/myself? included. The man has co-written two screen plays, if even a small percentage of this prose could be turned into theatre it would be incredible.

Notable performances – Graham, fortunately for us, has a clear strong reading voice. If you were to take Anthony Bourdain from Parts Unknown mix it with 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace and throw in a little Indianna Jones, you’d have a sense of the man.

Notable design/Production – On the big screen in the Engineered Air Theatre we see terrifying war footage and slides of photos taken by his family, him, other professional journalists, and photographers. (The young man with the horse picture in the program doesn’t represent the topic or impact of the talk.)

Notable direction – Not applicable.

One reason to see this show – It’s not a show, but it is one of the most impactful things I’ve seen on stage. Go.