‘Hassan: Iraq on the British Stage’

Abstract

This article examines Basil Dean's 1923 performance of James Elroy Flecker's play 'Hassan'.
\nIn the SAS (Special Air Service) headquarters in Hereford, England there is a regimental clock. On it is inscribed a verse from James Elroy Flecker's 1913 poem The Golden Road to Samarkand:
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\nWe are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go / Always a little further: it may be / Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow / Across that angry or that glimmering sea. / (Flecker, Samarkand 7)
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\nInherent in this epitaph is a spirit of travel and adventure, of conquering the natural world. But there is also potential danger ­ an unknown and unreachable goal. In recent years the SAS troops who completed their training in the shadow of this clock have been deployed in Iraq, a complex arena of war with its suicide bombers, rising civilian casualty count and tensions within the allied forces, both in the respective governments and in ground-level operations.