Iran-contra

Satire or soap opera?

CREATING fresh entertainment out of the Iran-contra affair is tricky. The true-life story was so rum, even grotesque, that a writer is hard put to improve on it. This does not stop people from trying. Mr Mike Robe, who wrote and directed a wooden four-hour television mini-series called "Guts & Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North" aired by CBS this week, says that his serious purpose was to warn hero-loving Americans that they should be rather more careful whom they embrace. Yet his film, as he himself acknowledges, will change few minds. The ratings it drew were somewhat lower than "Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman", aired at the same time by NBC.

Based on an instant-book life of Mr North by Mr Ben Bradlee Jr, the movie sputters along without shedding much light on the murky affair or its peculiar cast. The uncomfortable ambiguity of docudrama is deepened by Mr Robe's invention of a fictional character: a good guy, no less, in the National Security Council, who dresses Mr North down from time to time. Mr David Keith, the actor who plays the lead, admires Mr North and does his best for him. But he cannot do much with lines that confine him, most of the time, to patriotic cliche.

Mr North comes across as such a tedious fellow (though undoubtedly brave) that it is possible, almost, to feel sorry for the real man. He is shown to be a braggart, a compulsive liar, nasty to a boring wife, smarmy to superiors. Lucky that the jury, who at this very time were deciding the real Oliver North's fate, were sitting in sequestered hotel rooms in which the televisions were disconnected, making do with videos.

A couple of months ago, when Mr North's trial was beginning, theatre-goers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were treated to a much more inspired rendering of the Iran-contra story written by Mr Larry Gelbart, the creator of the M*A*S*H television series and co-author of the film "Tootsie". This new play, a satirical comedy called "Mastergate", takes place in a congressional hearing room where congressmen are investigating the takeover of a Hollywood movie studio by the CIA as a laundry for millions of dollars for freedom-fighting guerillas in Central America.

Satire is the tried and effective weapon against folly in public life. But events these days are so odd, Mr Gelbart told the Christian Science Monitor, that satirists are an endangered species. He was not, this time, trying to open people's eyes--they should, he believes, have already been opened--but to open their ears to the abuse of language, the gobbledygook that passes for speech in official circles. Fierce and funny, he mocks the way people lose moral direction, all sense of the "so-called truth", in the obfuscation of their words.

The play, which the New York Times found wonderfully funny, will be opening in New York in the autumn. A detour to Washington, home of all these goings-on, seemed appropriate. Not at all, demurred the establishment's own Kennedy Theatre, it would be most inappropriate. Another theatre, the Arena, may decide to give Washingtonians the chance to hear themselves talk.