Betrayed and Ramallah

Betrayed was always going to be a tough sell to me. Not only do I spend most of my time complaining about the tyranny of the script – there are far better ways to create theatre – I am proud of my ignorance about international politics. Betrayed, like David Greig's Ramallah, is taken from the experience of the author in a contested area: the arrival of the Americans in Iraq, the liberation or invasion – depending on political perspective. By studying the role of Iraq interpreters, author George Packer has attempted to disentangle the complex situation. Regarded as possible terrorists by their employers and traitors by resistance fighters, these interpreters are caught in the cultural cross-fire.

Packer's weakness is the failure to bring any depth to the characters. The Americans are thuggish or sentimental. The Iraq resistance, off-stage, is equally brutal. There is no attempt to question the various perspectives, or see the interpreters as anything other than victims. They are murdered, threatened, abandoned. Even in my bone-headed inability to grasp the basics of international diplomacy, I can discern that the situation shifts according to perspective. By being so determinedly sympathetic to the interpreters, any discussion is reduced to bland sloganeering.

The cast and director work hard to bring life into the sluggish script: they even bring some pathos to speeches that lean too heavily on the threat of cultural exile and violence. While it is bracing to see some genuinely political theatre, and the personal aspirations of both American officials and Iraqi interpreters go some way to bringing a human touch, this has all the charm of old fashioned agit-prop without the powerful politically agitated energy.

Ramallah follows the same path, in trying to bring home the realities of conflict to a personal level. Once again, a cast struggles with some weak writing: it is disappointing that David Greig has been so lazy. Set in a Scottish kitchen, a writer talks to his partner about his experiences in the Palestinian city. It then patronisingly connects the destruction of a children's theatre in an occupied territory with the bed-wetting of an Edinburgh child.

In other circumstances, the self-revelation of Greig's writing would be admirable – it rather reminded me of my own play about a critic who can't maintain relationships, recently rejected by The Royal Court. But like my play, the intimate details can't compensate for a lack of dramatic resonance. Against the determinedly engaged nature of the other two pieces in From The West Bank, it feels self-indulgent, not quite capturing enough satirical edge to expose a dilettante toying with politics or express the anxiety that Greig must have felt while visiting Ramallah.