War! Huh! What is it good for? Must all war plays be anti-war?

Well, a feast of cracking drama, for a start. But must all war plays be anti-war? Can't a play be thought-provoking without taking an entrenched view?

On my ninth birthday our family of peace-loving British communists trooped off to see the new play at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. It was a thing to marvel at. Living, as we thought, under the shadow of the H-bomb (a shadow to which many other Britons seemed to us to be absurdly indifferent), the musical Oh! What a Lovely War promised mass conversions to the cause of peace. Its use of popular songs, its subversion of jingoistic tropes, its cast of careless generals, callous statesmen and war profiteers jollying the poor bloody workers into the hell of the trenches were worth a hundred demonstrations and a million leaflets. We had culture on our side.

I dare say that “anti-war” people today may feel the same way when Oh! What A Lovely War is revived this spring. The bomb never quite dropped, of course, and there wasn’t another world conflagration, but over the intervening 40 years we’ve still had a few wars, and on each occasion theatre has been deployed somewhere.

This time, however, the reappearance of Joan Littlewood’s magnificent show prompts in me another thought altogether — largely because, over the years, I’ve sat through “anti-war” theatre from the satire on Lyndon Johnson, McBird, through Rolf Hochhuth’s conspiracist anti-Churchill play Soldiers, to David Hare’s relatively subtle Stuff Happens. I’ve seen dozens of ’em.

The thought is — or was — could there be a pro-war play? But, of course, I soon amended the question. If there were pro-imperialist plays in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, they have disappeared, leaving nothing behind. Any martial dramas concocted for Roman stages in the Mussolini period or to persuade Hitlerian Hamburgers of the benefits of fighting for Lebensraum are known only to quiet academics. It’s hard to regret their absence.

So my altered question is (and read this line carefully) whether a not anti-war play concerning war is possible. Can we even imagine a theatre in which the idea of war conveys complete moral ambiguity?

Of course, we can all name plenty of overtly anti-war plays, in which the words “the futility of war” will magic themselves into the programme notes, alongside a demand that Mrs This or President That take urgent account of the play’s timeless message. There isn’t a Greek drama, as far as I know, an anti-Lysistrata, in which women withhold sex from their husbands because the men are insufficiently belligerent. Nor a Journey’s Beginning, in which the young pup in the trenches who is excited by war survives and tells his grandchildren that he had the time of his life.

But what about true ambiguity? The first play I ever listened to on the radio (a year after the visit to Stratford East) was Henry IV Part I, and it was the first that I studied properly at school. When I heard it at the age of 10, I took the hero to be Harry Hotspur, the rebellious and warlike northern Earl. So much so that I decided that year to support the football team that shared his name, and have endured several decades of glorious frustration as a result.

At secondary school the play became — for the teachers at any rate — about the necessary victory of order over chaos. We late Sixties boys preferred chaos, and — in the time of Vietnam — related directly to Falstaff’s speech on honour on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. It is, in many ways, the seminal anti-war text: “What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead.”

So we preferred Falstaff to all the rest. Certainly to Hotspur, who now seemed crazy rather than heroic. “And if we live, we live to tread on kings; If die, brave death, when princes die with us!” sounded unattractive to young men heading towards serviceable age. And we preferred him to Hal, who eventually took the third way of (if you like) moderate and prudent war.

Besides, we knew where this was leading. To Henry V. There were very occasional productions of the three horrid (and anti-war) Henry VI’s but then, as today, their inferior dramaturgy meant that they were obscure to us. Henry V, on the other hand, had most famously been played on screen by Laurence Olivier in 1944. His film was unambiguously not anti-war. Indeed, it was ambiguously pro-war.

Now, it would be hard to imagine taking an anti-war play and subverting it (or “interpreting” it) in a pro-war way. Perhaps we could turn Henry VI’s warring and torturing Yorkists and Lancastrians into Saddamite Iraqis or Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and create an impression that it would be best if they were toppled. But don’t expect to see it in your lifetime.

But an anti-war Henry V? “Traditionalists may bridle, but this is emphatically a Henry V for our times,” wrote one critic of Nicholas Hytner’s 2003 production. “For our times” meant a Henry who was depicted as the bien pensant imagination imagined Tony Blair to be — charismatic, messianic and ruthless. It required troops in desert fatigues, a battery of stage techniques designed to juxtapose the hollowness of the kingly language with the reality of violence, and an undermining of the idea of Henry as the hero.

The idea that the production realised the play’s “ambiguity” was undermined by Hytner’s own words. In his view Shakespeare disapproved of Harry. “It’s a psychological compulsion of Henry’s always to be shifting responsibility,” Hytner told an interviewer. “Shakespeare was too good a playwright for this not to be deliberate. He has an uncanny knack of noticing things that seem to have happened yesterday. Who is to blame for so many Iraqi dead? The French, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis themselves, Syria. Anyone but the people who actually killed them.”

It was bloody awkward of Shakespeare then to place some of the most unambiguously stirring and heroic phrases in the English language in this flawed character’s mouth, while gifting him so few words that tend in the other direction. But no matter. We had Hytner to help us out.

If you can do this to Henry V, you can do it anything. Last autumn Brecht’s Mother Courage was revived by Deborah Warner, in a version by Tony Kushner. In his reflection on the play Kushner suggested an ambiguity because its “most hopeful moment is the one in which a town of sleeping people are awakened and summoned to battle against a merciless foe. The great moment of heroism and sacrifice is not a refusal to fight, but a call to arms.”

And this, in the modern era, is a true ambiguity. What is occupation and what is liberation? But Mother Courage herself, Fiona Shaw, said something slightly different. “The political situation in Iraq and Afghanistan absolutely informs the decision to stage the play now,” she said. “Its speeches — about forcing liberty on other countries, for instance — are so pertinent, sometimes I just want to insert the name George Bush.” But by that time — September 2009 — the name of the President surging in Afghanistan was Barack Obama.

The decision to have the serially anti-war writer Gore Vidal, who opposed America’s entry into the Second World War, as the narrator for Mother Courage suggests that Shaw’s interpretation was truer. One night at the curtain call Vidal reminded his audience from a wheelchair that “war goes on in Afghanistan”. “When he struggled to his feet,” one critic noted, “the audience responded with a standing ovation.”

That tells you something, of course. Vidal, though a bonny essayist, is practically an idiot politically, with his conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor, the Oklahoma bombing and 9/11. But he is a reliable American antiAmerican, which seems to be the default emotion of the London subsidised theatre-goer.

But there is something missing. The problem is, of course, the Taleban. In all these situations the problem is the Taleban. When Michael Foot died last week there were many reminders that he had been a peace campaigner committed to CND. There were fewer that he had been in favour of rearmament in the late 1930s, had supported the sending of the task force to the Falklands in 1982 and had wanted intervention over Bosnia in the 1990s. Foot was a militant anti-fascist, and he was prepared to countenance fighting bad people.

I thought about this when contrasting the hidden and not-so-hidden messages in two of David Edgar’s recent plays. In Edgar’s 2000 drama about Albert Speer, the dead Hitler asks why the world didn’t take his words seriously and act accordingly. One implication is that an earlier battle against Hitler might have been preferable. If you think about it, war may not always be futile.

Then, last year, in his contribution to the remarkable multi-author play cycle on Afghanistan, The Great Game, shown at the Tricycle theatre, Edgar made the unambiguous case that we are fooling ourselves about Afghanistan, just as the Russians did in the 1980s. War is clearly futile. Rather wonderfully, the Tricycle extravaganza, by permitting many different writers to approach the subject of Afghanistan, allowed some real thinking about when arms might be right, and over two days became the closest thing to a not anti-war drama that I had ever seen.

The Great Game raised some real possibilities. What we need to happen for not anti-war drama is what Richard Bean did with England People Very Nice at the National, a play that took risks because it made its audience uncomfortable. Maybe the “target”of such a play could be the comfortable non-interventions of the audiences themselves — the psychology of withdrawal. The young Gore Vidal was a member of America First, the powerful organisation that fought American involvement in the fight against Nazism after 1939. There are plenty of parallels there, if someone cared to develop them.

Oh! What a Lovely War is at Northern Stage, Newcastle (0191-230 5151), to Mar 27, then touring to May 22 (www.ohwhatalovelywar.co.uk)

PUTTING UP A FIGHT: FIVE BEST WAR PLAYS

Journey’s End A revival of R. C. Sheriff’s First World War drama is currently on tour. If you think Blackadder Goes Forth made trench dramas redundant, think again: this 1928 depiction of the wastefulness of war remains quietly devastating.

Our Class This bleak drama by the Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek, staged at the National Theatre last year, looked at what happened when Pole turned on Pole in the village of Jedwabne during the Nazi occupation in 1941. Relentless, yes, but sobering, morally complex, haunting too.

Iphigenia at Aulis The director Katie Mitchell brought Euripides to the 1930s for this phenomenal 2004 production at the National Theatre. Agamemnon plans to sacrifice his daughter to Artemis in order to get help in getting his fleet to Troy. All, to cut a long story short, does not go smoothly.

Black Watch The playwright Gregory Burke interviewed soldiers from the Scottish regiment of the title for this 2006 look at the realities of being a serviceman in Iraq — boredom, comradeship, death — that turned into something profoundly theatrical. The National Theatre of Scotland took it around the world for two years.

War Horse Everything you expect from a First World War drama: bleak landscapes, explosions, terror. But by focusing on a horse, brought to jaw-dropping life by Handspring Puppets, it brought home the horrors of war to even the jaded. Currently in the West End, and bound for Broadway.

Dominic Maxwell

David Aaronovitch, The Times 08-03-2010