Literature and Politics

As a folk hero,  Kilroy emerged during the second World War,  leaving a trail of taggings behind the enemy lines to be found by the advancing forces.  Kilroy’s most famous entry into literature is probably Tennessee Williams’  Camino Real,  but he remains a popular stock figure and is central to Baghdad Baby! by the New Zealand playwright Dean Parker.

Parker’s Kilroy is a Mother Courage,  a composite everyman who invites identification from an American ‘moral majority,’ the God-fearing right, a pivotal supporter of the war effort.  However,  as has been his common recent practice,  Parker used a wide array of documentary material to create his composite Kilroy,  sources which were both eclectic and in some cases already well-known from the media.   The first scene is contextualised by a diva singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’,  the lyrics broken by Kilroy’s entrance,  pulling down the American flag and announcing that the only flag flown would be Iraqi.  As Kilroy’s speech proceeds,  however,  it becomes clear that is closely based on an extempore address by Colonel Tim Collins to men of the Royal Irish Regiment in the Kuwaiti desert on 19 March 2003; the speech was widely reported,  and drew a response praising Collins’ ‘civilised and humane words’ from the Commander in  Chief of the Royal Gurkha Rifles,  who simply signed himself Charles. Two scenes later,  Kilroy reappears,  but this time expressing his ‘exhilaration’ at seeing the airliners strike the Twin Towers, in fact voicing a well-known piece of journalism by Christopher Hitchens.

The play unfolds as a very complex tissue of quotations,  but the transparency of the dramaturgic transposition means that a more fundamental question emerges:  in this mediatised medley,  does any single voice retain an authority,  or is the audience left with a refraction of slogans whose origins fade into obscurity?

Howard McNaughton has published widely in modern and postcolonial drama. He has become increasingly involved in Cultural Studies, and has recently been published in Social Semiotics and Theatre Research International. He was NZ editor of the Encyclopedia of Post Colonial Literatures in English (Routledge, 2005). His latest books are Figuring the Pacific (2005) and The Reinvention of Everyday Life: Culture in the Twenty-first Century (2006), which will appear in a Chinese edition in 2009.