User Reviews

London 2010. The war in Iraq is not over yet, Tony Blair has finally resigned, Gordon Brown is new Prime Minister. Mr. Blair, obsessed with his place in history, his legacy and his pompous memoirs, haunted by images of the carnage in Iraq and suffering from pangs of conscience, fails to realise that public (and published?) opinion perceives him as a war criminal and that he has become a liability to his successor – and to Hillary Clinton, US president. They abandon him to be put on trial at The Hague. Ignoring all warnings, failing to read the writing on the wall, he staggers into the trap, is arrested and extradited to the International Criminal Court.

This, in a nutshell, is the plot of the TV play "The Trial of Tony Blair", produced by Channel Four. It is beautifully filmed and edited, superbly acted and sometimes outrageously funny, and yet not quite satisfactory.

It is uneven piece and the first half of the film teeters between political satire, sitcom, malicious revenge fantasy and serious drama, never deciding what it really wants to be. The humour is heavy-handed, some of the jokes are unsubtle and the characters drawn with a rather thick brush. Mr. Blair's vanity and egomania almost hurt, Mr. Brown seems not too bright, and Cherie Blair's first scene shows her as venomous termagant. Ah, yes, David Cameron gets a not-too-subtle bashing too, of course, which brings the plot nowhere.

I was ready to dismiss the film as a vindictive fantasy, not above using clichés to drive home its point, when, suddenly, it became dark and serious. The second half had me on the edge of my seat. There are interesting character developments; Mr. Blair's self-assurance starts crumbling when he begins to suffer from nightmares and hallucinations about the carnage in Iraq; Cherie softens to a voice of reason and support. Tony Blair converts to Roman Catholicism as the idea of forgiveness of sins appeals to him, and if the writer, Mr. Alistair Beaton, wished to make him appear a mere hypocrite and the notion just ridiculous, he did not succeed. As the net tightens around him the former Prime Minister becomes truly oppressed by his guilt, and his vanity and megalomania are parts of a mask worn very thin.

We watch him slowly falling apart. He is arrested and some disturbing scenes follow. When he is swabbed for DNA, a policeman smiles and comments maliciously while inflicting unnecessary pain upon him. The mood becomes even more oppressive when he suffers a heart attack and has to wait for hours in a filthy NHS hospital. "I hung my head" sung by Johnny Cash accompanies this sequence and we are indeed under the impression that a death sentence has been passed. An attempt at Confession fails – he is still too proud for unconditional contrition – he is locked into a tiny, claustrophobic cell in a police van, so humbled that he now may in earnest embark on the spiritual journey that could save his soul.

All members of the cast are marvellous, but Robert Lindsay as Tony Blair is just brilliant. He has expressed anger and disappointment at Mr. Blair's policy, but his artistic integrity keeps him from letting his personal opinion mar his performance. He carries the play and lifts it to a higher level, that of cathartic drama. Mr. Lindsay's stunning dark eyes and eye-brows act like a magnifying glass, intensifying the emotions he conveys. He makes watching a formerly powerful man disintegrate before our very eyes compelling. Phoebe Nicholls sensitively plays his wife Cherie, and they share some of the most powerful scenes.

Several of them simply took my breath away. In a nightmare Mr. Blair carries a dead Iraqi boy in his arms; there is his despair while waiting for treatment in casualty and the loving looks he has for Cherie. The way Mr. Lindsay uses body language is striking. A very slender man, he looks not only vulnerable but positively fragile at the end. Watch out for how he steels himself to overcome his horror of the police van at the end and thereby regains the dignity he has lost before in moments of delusion.

So, in the end "The Trial of Tony Blair" impresses as a rather powerful drama, and yet I was not completely happy with it, for all the brilliant performances. The basic idea is mainly vindictive and in my opinion a crude way to express political discontent. The war in Iraq was wrong; nevertheless Tony Blair can't be compared to people like Milosevic or Charles Taylor. Overoptimistic and naïve with regard to its outcome (peace and democracy), what he had in mind was almost certainly not mass slaughter and religious wars.

Moreover, supranational institutions like the International Criminal Court do not automatically guarantee that problems will be solved and wrongs righted. Look at the European Community – it brought a loss of sovereignty and government by unaccountable bureaucrats, implementing policies a majority of citizens would never vote for. Who controls these institutions? Who questions their policies? If, as in this play, the decision whether to extradite a former British Prime Minister to The Hague depends on partisan politics and petty revenge (and this does not seem too improbable!), one can only doubt the legality and efficiency of this tribunal, and sincerely hope that no Western politician will ever stoop so low as Gordon Brown in this left-wing revenge fantasy.

Not as profound as it should have been. Because - and here's the spoiler - there is no trial .The film chronicles all the events leading up to the trial. Not the trial itself. Despite that ultimate disappointment, Robert Lindsay and Phoebbe Nicholls give spirited performances (as Tony and Cherie).Though his targets aren't tough and in many ways taking a satiric view of the last days of Tony Blair's time in office is like shooting ducks in a barrel; Alistair Beaton's script does offer a few genuine laughs along the way. More laughs than insight. My favorite sequence was when Cherie goes for a walk around their new neighborhood.