Review: AFGHANISTAN IS NOT FUNNY, Arcola Theatre

If the title did not warn you, two mentions of Joseph Heller was at least one more than was required to drive home the fact that Henry Naylor, comedian, satirist and playwright, was calling for cover from those who have mined the humour in the intrinsically absurd activity of conflict. But, as he finds out, the post-911 Afghan conflict was gruesome - oh, oh, oh, oh, oh not a lovely war.

He didn't really find out. Castigating the BBC and other news organisations who lodged their correspondents, like First World War generals, a safe distance from the front, he swooped, with a touch of Scoop's William Boot's naivety clinging to him, into Kabul. The city was held by Western forces, but with warlords circling it ready to pounce.

In a monologue (the style is reminiscent of Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia), Naylor explains why he went there, what he did there and how it has affected him. He frames it in the form of reporting his therapy sessions, triggered by the West's shameful chickenrun from the country when the Taliban seized it (again) in August 2021. Not for the last time, one gets the feeling that the show is tilted a little too much towards what's best for Henry - stand-ups eh?

Nevertheless, he's been there, seen it and got the photos. To his credit and, after rather more set up than was absolutely required, it's the photographs that bring the show to life. Taken by Naylor's friend, the Glaswegian photographer and now TV mogul, Sam Maynard, these images achieve a stated aim of both men - they circumvent the squeamishness of news executives (a fortunate happenstance for politicians) and show the pain of war without regard to matters of taste. We see anguish, we see fear and we see the human spirit crushed and blooming. We also see images that could have come straight out of Catch-22 and meet a US Army colonel who might be Colonel Cathcart made flesh (and proves every bit as dangerous as he sounds).

Such pictures were once the staple of the Sunday supplements, the likes of Don McCullin reporting the rawness of war, but that immediacy and power, like so much else in the media, seems to have slipped away while we weren't looking.

If there's a hero in the hellhole, it's Houmein, who learned English from listening to The Archers on the World Service and knows what's dangerous and what's not - or, rather, what's too dangerous and what's not. That's a difference that Naylor took too long to see, a fact he acknowledges with the required quantum of shame.

Your feelings towards this show will be determined by your reaction to that sentence. If you believe that a bumbling Cambridge-educated smartarse can never justify flaunting his entitlement before people living in abject misery, all for the sake of a gloss of authenticity to apply to an Edinburgh hit, no amount of mea culpa on Naylor's part will warm you to the show. If you believe that human folly (even at its most deadly) demands that we both point and laugh and point and cry, you will see its value, catch the jokes and come away wiser, more respectful of the suffering, closer (if still distant) to its victims.

And, after all, when did you last see a teenage Afghan on the news with hate in her eyes? Naylor leaves us with that necessary image and it does, just, shift me into the latter of those two camps. Which is, of course, its purpose and rather leads us back to where the ethical argument started.

Afghanistan Is Not Funny is at the Arcola Theatre until 11 March

Photo Credit: Paul Ullathorne

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