LAND OF THE FREED

Theatre is his weapon, plays his ammunition, Steve Pratt speaks to the playwright who became the subject of an FBI smear campaign after targeting the American estabilshment.

HALFWAY through the interview Donald Freed asks if I've seen the leaflets put out by the FBI to smear his name. Copies of the memorandum from the 1960s are duly produced, along with a copy of his latest play, Patient No 1, in which George W Bush is portrayed as a gibbering wreck in a psychiatric clinic five years from now.

The play, which Freed claims is "feared in America as being politically unacceptable", will receive its world premiere at York Theatre Royal early next year.

The man sitting in the theatre's cafe enjoying tea and cake doesn't look his age - he's approaching his mid-70s - and hardly fulfills anyone's idea of someone whose political activism and criticism of governments, presidents and the security agencies prompted one writer to begin a magazine profile of him with the words, "Donald Freed is a pain in the ass".

He's certainly been a thorn in the side of the powers-that-be as he aims to show that the pen is mightier than the sword. Theatre is his weapon, plays are his ammunition. "Donald Freed is a writer of blazing imagination, courage and insight. His work is a fearless marriage of politics and art," fellow writer Harold Pinter has said of America's leading political playwright.

In the Land of the Freed, the talk is of conspiracy theories, assassination, Socrates, Euripides, Freud, McCarthy and virtually any recent US President you'd care to name.

He's in voluntary exile from his homeland as, among other things, writer-in-residence at York Theatre Royal.

Robert Altman filmed Secret Honor, his play about Nixon. An earlier film he co-wrote, Executive Action with Burt Lancaster, questioned the circumstances of the killing of JFK. Pinter directed Faye Dunaway as a paranoid First Lady in Circe And Bravo, while Jack Lemmon and Michael Gambon starred in his play Veterans' Day.

He's enthusiastic about both the York theatre and its artistic director Damien Cruden. He talks of "the core of great English theatre", referring to "the danger is in the cutting of budgets".

Freed's arrival for his year-long British stay coincided with an article in The Guardian asking where were the new political plays expected in the wake of recent US-UK political disasters. Patient No 1 would appear to be one of the few.

"What's missing is political theatre, although that term is terrible, like political correctness. Political theatre is theatre," he says.

Chicago-born Freed worked as an actor and producer, running a theatre in West Hollywood at one point, until he wrote a play, Inquest, in the 1960s. It was about the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sentenced to death for passing nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union.

This was the play that led the FBI to launch a smear campaign against Freed and caused the agency to open files on everyone involved in the production. It also set Freed on the path of theatrical activism.

"I was so naive when I wrote Inquest about the Rosenberg case," he says. "I was already mature in the theatre as an actor, director and producer. I taught, I did everything in the arts.

"By 1967 or so, I felt that the time was right. Everyone was on the streets, so why couldn't the Rosenberg case be? I wasn't even a real Jewish intellectual because I'd grown up in the South. My family weren't political.

"In the 1950s I ran a theatre and was part of Ban the Bomb. That didn't carry over into the theatre. I did a little Brecht and that, but the penny hadn't dropped.

"Inquest was done in a little studio theatre and the play was rather crude. I was using slides and putting it together like a collage, stuck together with some scenes I wrote. Suddenly the New York Times descended on Cleveland and everyone was talking about the Rosenberg case."

Freed has learnt how far a political writer can go. "It's one thing to shock people being against the war in Vietnam or Iraq but another to shock people with the supposition that John Kennedy was murdered at the level of a conspiracy," he says. "It depends not just on the style, but the content. Today, no one believes the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy killing, except those few diehards who've invested their time into turning the word conspiracy into a household word. Granted, there's a lot of nonsense spoken about conspiracies just as there's a lot of nonsense spoken about the tooth fairy."

Freed has written about the assassination of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, about Watergate, and much more. Secret Honour, in which Nixon drunkenly rambles on about his past, is probably his best-known work.

Patient No 1 will undoubtedly attract attention because of its portrayal of the current US President. Freed will direct a US version after Cruden premieres the work in York.

He's no fan of Bush. "I hate and loathe and fear the man and what he stands for," he says unabashedly.

The difference with Secret Honour is that Nixon was "out of office and not on a pedestal" when the play was done. So Patient No 1 is set five years in the future when Bush is no longer in the White House but in an insane asylum. "I knew that would elicit hollers of joy from people who were always ready to kick him and said he was mad anyway," says Freed.

The playwright has found a way to use his life for him rather than against him, just as he did with Nixon. "They came to laugh, and did laugh, but also wept at Richard Nixon - and never forgave me for that," he says.

He doesn't know if Nixon ever saw Secret Honour, but he had word from White House staff that they felt it was spot on.

"Nixon never stopped talking. Patient No 1 was torture to write because there's nothing to Bush. That's a fake Texan accent. Nixon was arguably himself; George W Bush is not himself. He's not yet his father, he's not the opposite of his father and he's not himself. That's what's terrifying - that loss of identity is true of all of the American empire.

"We have the funding of torture and the loss of habeas corpus. Ten years ago if America lost the right of habeas corpus, you'd say you'd been reading 1984."

* Donald Freed is presenting a series of theatre-based masterclasses at York Theatre Royal in October and November with guest participants including writers, directors, authors and academics. Tickets are available from York Theatre Royal box office or by calling 01904-623568.

9:34am Monday 22nd October 2007