'This entire story sounds more than a little preposterous from the get-go. It revolves round an unlikely character, a Scot named Rory Stewart, who, in so many ways, seems out of another, more romantic age. In his twenties he was a soldier and a diplomat before deciding to walk across Afghanistan. He returned home, to the Scottish Borders, to plant 400 trees.'

'“It is March 2003,” says Stewart, played by Henry Lloyd-Hughes with remarkable verisimilitude. “I watch the invasion of Iraq on TV. I’m not in the Foreign Office any more. But I send in my CV anyway.”'

'Unbelievable? Believe it. In 2006 Stewart, now an MP, wrote a memoir that inspired his old school friend Stephen Brown to write this play about Stewart’s time in Maysan, trying to quell chaos by (so British) forming a local council. It’s like a very sophisticated but deadly form of parish politics, the two local bigwigs being the charismatic “Prince of the Marshes” Karim (a regal Silas Carson) and an on-the-rise Shia cleric, Seyyed Hassan (Johndeep More).'

Even on a good day (and there aren’t many), it’s a hornet’s nest in a hurricane. It is all portrayed on a stark set of interlocking concrete walls, harsh and desert-like, by Paul Wills. Simon Godwin directs with a sure hand.'

'You wouldn’t have thought being a governorate co-ordinator could have been this interesting, but Lloyd-Hughes is riveting, embodying this sub-Lawrentian figure, a man of high ideals who is left having to grapple with the everyday reality of a land at war with itself and, also, with him. In Iraq the devil is in the detail, and this fascinating play gives us exactly that.'

To read the full review click here to visit The Times online.

From Rory Stewart's acclaimed memoir of the same name, Stephen Brown has fashioned this gripping, thought-provoking, sometimes gruesomely funny play which runs 110 minutes without an interval.  Performed against Paul Wills's design of sliding concrete walls with frazzling florescent tubes, Simon Godwin's production boasts a terrific central performance from Henry Lloyd-Hughes.  Switching easily between direct address and dialogue, he radiates the intelligence, charm and sometimes naïve idealism and stubbornness of Stewart who here, in front of an ever-denser collage of yellow post-it notes, describes the difficulties of arriving at a representative council as akin to working out “the table plan for the world's most awkward wedding”. 

The excellent John Mackay doubles as Paul Bremer, US leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, with his unrealistic talk of building “a multi-ethnic, decentralised prosperous state, based on human rights” and the British Colonel who is disgruntled by Rory's attempts to include in the negotiations Seyyed Hassan (Johndeep More) the hardline Sadrist leader whose followers have just murdered six British policemen. “You say these people want democracy. They want to be not fucking dead,” he ripostes.  

The ace performances have a vivid story-telling vigour a swift knack of suggesting three-dimensional life. It's only by conveying the depth of culture within the Iraqi characters that you can get the measure of the intractable problems that arise when two visions of the world clash. Aiysha Hart is keenly impassioned as Rana, an Iraqi woman running a project to teach local women to sew, who can already see the signs of a resurgent misogynist repression. Nezar Alderazi snags your heart as Rory's translator who informs us that in 2006, almost certainly by members of an Islamist militia, he will be dragged from his car and shot dead. The Coalition certainly did not leave behind a multicultural democracy. But does that failure mean that we should stand by and writhe from all thoughts of intervention in the future?  That's the question that is left hanging in the air at the end of this compelling piece.

To read the full review click here to visit The Independent online