Reframing the Iraq War Through Verbatim Theatre: A Lyotardian Postmodern Rendering of Jonathan Holmes’s Fallujah

Abstract

Fallujah, by Jonathan Holmes (2007), is one of the archetypal examples of verbatim theatre, which addresses the truths of the Iraq War through dramatised eyewitness accounts and documentation reconstructions. Sketched in the Second Battle of Fallujah, the play reveals moral, political, and epistemological aspects of how modern warfare is presented. This article hinges on the postmodern theory of Jean-François Lyotard—especially the concepts of language games, paralogy, and the differend—to discuss the play Fallujah as a subversion of official grand narratives of the Iraq War. Through the use of testimonial intertextuality, irony and fragmentation, Holmes builds a multidimensional tableau of discourse contradictions in which truth is relative, and legitimacy is constantly deferred. The play turns into a meta-discursive critique of Western power dynamics, challenging the manner in which the knowledge is created, distributed, and twisted in the name of liberation and humanitarianism. Further, the article examines both dramaturgical and aesthetic techniques that lend truthfulness to Holmes’ concept of the verbatim approach as it dislocates the truth in relation to war and victimhood. The results help us comprehend the role of modern theatre in the reconstruction of the cultural memory and morality in the post-war era. The article concludes that Fallujah is a vivid example of postmodern theatrical resistance, an ethical and artistic response to commodity violence and the obliteration of lived suffering.

1. Introduction

Fallujah, written in 2007 by Jonathan Holmes, is a spellbinding British verbatim play acclaimed by critics for its nuanced and unflinching dramatic delineation of one of the deadliest battles of the Iraq War. The play Fallujah is set against the background of the Second Battle of Fallujah, also notorious as Operation Phantom Fury, which took place in 2004 and pitted American, British and Iraqi soldiers to recapture the Iraqi city of Fallujah from the “insurgents” grip (Holmes 2007, p. 148). The play’s title is inspired by the name of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, representing the wide-ranging convolutions and struggles linked with modern conflict. In doing so, the title unswervingly conjures up the ferocious and muddled battle occurrences as a stark reminder of the Iraq War’s human cost. Accordingly, the play’s title encapsulates the physical and psychic anguish endured by soldiers and civilians alike.

Building upon this symbolic significance of the title, the play’s internal structure further reinforces its thematic engagement with war and memory, converting these ideas into a vivid, hypnotic dramaturgical framework. Fallujah is structured into four acts, totalling 32 scenes. It begins with a prologue in which the US national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, is interviewed by an Al-Jazeera journalist. The scenes interchange with varying speeds, each intertwined and interconnected with the past and the next scene. Each scene addresses a specific theme concerning the battles in Fallujah, with certain scenes involving only onscreen content and voiceovers. The last scene is an epilogue that involves Rice delivering a speech at a Midwestern Presbyterian Church after the Fallujah battles have subsided. The play Fallujah is structured to begin and end with the US perspective on the battles in Fallujah city, as depicted by Condoleezza Rice. All scenes in between are interspersed with eyewitness testimonies and interviews about what happened in Fallujah.

The intricate structure of the play is complemented by a scenography that deepens its realism and immerses the audience in the sensory and psychological experience of warfare. The play Fallujah takes place in April and November 2004 (Holmes 2007, p. 148). Exceptions in the play are the first and last scenes, with the latter taking place in 2005 and the former in October 2001 (Holmes 2007, p. 148). The play was staged in a loft-like, unused brewery converted into a theatre, with overpowering sound effects of low-lying helicopters and rocket fire to make it appear more real (Khadim 2022, p. 88). In the history of Iraq, the site of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq War was Fallujah (Matus 2021, p. 2), and the use of such overpowering sound effects aimed to reinvent and re-represent the atmosphere of Fallujah during the battles, its siege and the aftermath of war.

Beyond the atmospheric and temporal design, the play’s narrative composition further unfolds through authentic testimonies that drive its dramatic action and ethical force. The plot of Fallujah revolves around eyewitness testimonies of what happened in the city during the Iraq invasion. Historically, Fallujah witnessed and bore the brunt of the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War (Matus 2021, p. 2). Several people who saw the atrocities of the war narrate their experiences in the play, with US officials also included to register the American perspective of the Iraq War and, in particular, its involvement in Fallujah.

By assembling testimony, fragments of media, and statements from the public domain into a documentary montage, Holmes balances authenticity and theatrical construction together in a manner that suggests meaning is made out of friction rather than an inherently linear chronology (Holmes 2007, pp. 141, 143). This juxtaposition provides some kind of resolution—not by offering a denial that trauma is finally settled, but by permitting the viewers to identify the patterns or links of denial, euphemism, and even moral injury across the competing voices, in reinstating a space of the public where the victims’ suffering can be named, remembered, and ethically witnessed.

Closure is created in the evidentiary logic of the script when the spectator can juxtapose contradictory stories and observe the official discourse being confronted by the encountered experience. Notably, the victims/witnesses in the play are presented through interviews and published testimonies that precede the performance (e.g., aid workers, doctors, journalists whose citations are part of the performance), not through interviews that would entail asking victims to report their experience of watching the play.

The staging does as well encourage active spectatorship: the performers move in and out of the shared area, give bits of testimony at close quarters to the audience, and cross and recross the line between the auditorium and the playing ground, locating spectators as first-keepers of the testimonies of press briefings, reports on the field, and civic testification.

An actual demonstration of the truth-claiming dramaturgy characteristic of Holmes is manifested in the documentary counterpoint of the play, in which an eyewitness is brought to the stage and his narrative shown in opposition to an official denial—as in the case of Rana being brought to the stage to witness incendiary evidence, immediately followed by a categorical refusal on the part of the Pentagon spokesperson (Holmes 2007, p. 170). This cross-cut feature heightens the sense of events as they have occurred by maintaining the contemporaneous opposition of discourses.

Central to this testimonial narrative are the diverse characters whose voices embody the multiple perspectives and contradictions of the Iraq War. Characters of Fallujah are an Iraqi cameraman, a senior British cleric, a British major, an Iraqi doctor, Sasha [a reporter], Jo [a British witness], Rana [an Iraqi aid worker], Ahrar [another Iraqi aid worker], Condoleezza Rice [U.S. national security advisor], a US General, Luce [a French journalist], the US Ambassador, a journalist working for Al-Jazeera, A US Sniper, several US soldiers, a US Commander, Fallujah civilians, aides, medical staff, businessmen, journalists, spokespeople. Collectively, these characters not only animate the historical realities of the conflict but also serve as conduits for Holmes’s broader postmodern critique of truth, power, and representation.

2. Theoretical Framework

This study adopts a qualitative and interpretive methodology grounded in Lyotardian postmodern theory, employing close reading and textual analysis to explore Fallujah’s dramatic construction and philosophical implications. Drawing upon Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) and related scholarship, the analysis foregrounds language games, paralogy, the differend, and incredulity toward metanarratives as interpretive lenses.

Grand narrative is employed in its strict sense in this article: the legitimating metanarrative (e.g., progress, safety, civilisation, liberation) that legitimises knowledge and political action contrary to specific policy pronouncements or media slogans. Here, I handle the political discourse of the war adopted by states (including particular justifications, denials, or choices in defining things) as local formulations that derive their legitimacy from, and are inculcated into, wider legitimating metanarratives. When I speak of the postmodern condition, I refer to what Lyotard describes as evolving conditions of legitimation, where such metanarratives do not enjoy unquestioned authority and varied language games develop to address what is considered credible knowledge.

The verbatim theatre form provides the methodological base, allowing Holmes to merge documented testimonies with dramatic performance to question epistemic authority. This article treats the play as both a discursive artefact and an ethical act—a performative mode that reconstructs political trauma through narrative multiplicity. The interpretive framework integrates textual hermeneutics (for thematic analysis) and dramaturgical critique (for performance structure), aligning with the postmodern rejection of totalizing histories.

A key assumption of this investigation is the cardinal paradox of verbatim theatre: it wants to provide the voices and documentary facts of the real world, but it can do so only with the help of curation, the selection, editing, sequencing and acting. This inherent tension is significant to the argument constructed below, as it informs the regulation of testimony authorisation, the establishment of competing discourses in collision, and the audience as spectators of an artificial experience of encounter with the multi-narrative experience of the war.

By adopting this theoretical perspective, the analysis will discuss Holmes’ verbatim text as performative, not simply due to the text being written to be performed, but due to the active production of publicly witnessing and ethically addressing effects occurring in the present (recognition, accountability, contestation) as well as the merely historical nature of the text itself. The micro-narrations of trauma, resistance, and identity are not narrated alone but also reworked as a common happening of listening and bringing judgment. As such, the study evaluates the manner in which Fallujah disrupts the grand discourses about the Iraq War, especially those promoted by the Western powers and how it develops an opposing discourse grounded in personal experience, moral greyness, and plural truth.

3. Analytical Method

The article employs textual and discourse analysis to analyse several discussions, staging decisions, and representational plans in Fallujah. This discussion allows me to pinpoint the points at which the play questions institutionalised power regimes, and the fact that it is verbatim means that the voice of the subaltern, that can be more audibly preempted, though even that “recovery” will be mediated by a process of selection, editing and performance framing is understood in the Gramscian/Spivakian sense of those who are structurally marginal in dominant political and media regimes of representation (such as Iraqi civilian witnesses whose experience is regularly refracted through official discourse) The study cross-references the critical scholarship on postmodern theatre, documentary drama, and the Lyotardian epistemology to argue the point.

4. Research Aim and Significance

The drive of this study is to examine a specific topic and provide insights into its significance. The article will seek to provide an example of Fallujah as suggestive of the Lyotardian postmodern rendering of war by reorganising truth to become plural, contingent, and with ethical undertones. Such discussion is significant due to the fact that it makes clear how the contemporary verbatim theatre, rather than merely a reflection of the post-war culture, actively intervenes in it: placing the voices of the documents and the institutional speech side by side, it destabilises what the mainstream political and media discourses stabilize as the truth and puts the assumptions, which authorities make in order to justify the decisions, in question, with their consequences being disastrous to the human lives. In this regard, the discussion supports the argument that the verbatim theatre may serve as an epistemological challenge, revealing how official knowledge is produced, authorized and distributed, as well as to challenge the representational shape of the very war, whose sufferings can be narrated, whose voices can be heard, and which forms of narratives should prevail within the communal consciousness. The meaning, then, of its importance is to demonstrate that Fallujah is part of some larger conflict over meaning: not only in what has occurred, but how it can be narrated, by whom, and in what manner, with as well as without ethical and political consequences.

5. Analysis and Discussion

Dramaturgical aspects: The analysis identifies the key documentary practices of the play: non-linear sequencing and montage, the contrast of official speech and witness testimonies, the creation of an ambience of pro-production of the sense of the real by the use of sounds, and the proximity between the actors (even the moments of moving among the audience). Those devices are not simply the ornament of the testimony; they just arrange the ways in which the various discursive regimes (military, media, civilian) are made audible and comparable on the stage.

Implications for audience response: The implication of isolating technique and effect is the fact that the argument points to how these tricks open up an implicated form of spectatorship, not to a participatory theatre of immediate intervention, but to a kind of active wit-witnessing and critical judgement. Juxtaposition may produce irony or moral confrontation, non-linearity may make one reconsider causal accounts, and immersive staging may heighten the artificially induced affectivity and remind us that truth is being reconstructed and even argued over.

The play Fallujah disapproves of and severely criticises the decisions made by political and military leaders, examining the grey of their effects on individuals. By doing so, Fallujah aligns with postmodernism’s critical stance against authority and places a premium on divulging power dynamics. Hence, it challenges the spectators to face the grim realities of war without the filter of fictionalisation. It contemplates the human cost of political and military actions by nurturing distrust in the audience to scrutinise official grand narratives.

Scepticism of grand narratives lies at the core of the Lyotardian Postmodern condition (Lyotard n.d., p. 1). Forms of knowledge production in the postmodern condition also portray significant changes that depart from the grand narratives of previous eras, and these changes are directly reflected in the knowledge itself (Hui 2020, p. 126). In Fallujah, the postmodern condition is depicted in numerous manifestations, spanning from the actual accounts of the battles and their aftermath to the kind of weaponry used during the assault on Fallujah. The context, setting, structure, and plot of the play Fallujah generate a localised, contextual approach to how the general public thinks about the assault on the city of Fallujah.

For example, the public was fed on the grand narrative that napalm was not used in Fallujah by the US Marine Corps that was deployed to Fallujah. However, evidence presented by characters such as Rana in the Fallujah play, soldiers, and a US general refutes such claims. Rana provided medical aid to civilians in Fallujah during the assault (Amera 2019, p. 107). Rana, in Scene 7 of the play, narrates the evidence she witnessed when they went to rescue a woman who had been left with a blind old man, and how, after calling out for someone to show themselves, she saw something she had never seen in her work of dealing with human bodies (Desouqi and El-Sayyed 2018, p. 17). It was the body of the old man, which was no longer quite recognisable due to the effects of napalm:

Rana (ONSCREEN): The evidence I’ve seen about that; I mean, I’ve seen it, not even someone told me about it. When I went looking for a woman, left with a blind old man in the house, we enter into the house and start calling her… but I just noticed something in the garden and it was a body but I couldn’t really recognize it, and it looked really bad –it was a body with the color green, and I have never seen this all my life, and my work is dealing with dead bodies and all this stuff, but I never seen a body with a green color.

(Holmes 2007, p. 170)

In the same scene, immediately after Rana’s onscreen narration, the Pentagon Spokesperson denies the usage of napalm in Iraq, claiming the use of something different:

Pentagon Spokesman (ONSCREEN): Napalm has not been used in Iraq. We use Mark 77 incendiary. The US took napalm out of service in the 1970s. We completed the destruction of the last batch of napalm on 4 April 2001, and no longer maintain any stocks of napalm.

(Holmes 2007, p. 170)

The grand narratives claiming napalm was not used in Iraq are further disproved in later scenes of the play, as during their kidnapping, a man narrates to Jo what happened to his family and best friend:

Man: My brother was killed, and my brother’s son and my sister’s son. My other brother is in prison at Abu Ghraib. I am the last one left. Can you imagine? And this morning, my best friend was killed. He was wounded in the leg and lying in the street, and the Americans came and cut his throat. Now, tell me, why us? Is it another crusade? First, they wanted Saddam. Was my brother Saddam? Now they say they search for Zarqawi. Are the children they shoot Zarqawi? Are the people they napalm Zarqawi? This is our Hiroshima.

(Holmes 2007, p. 179)

Additionally, Rana finds someone who knows more about napalm and who explains how napalm works:

Rana (ONSCREEN): And I later met a guy with experience in these things, and he said this is the chemical weapons that they use… They use these weird bombs that spew smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. Pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt people’s skin even when water was dumped on their bodies. People suffered so much from these, both civilians and fighters alike. There is a terrible crime going on in Fallujah, and they do not want anybody to know.

(Holmes 2007, p. 188)

Napalm is a prohibited weapon that was extensively used in Fallujah by the American forces. While the Pentagon spokesman illogically denies its use, there is incriminating evidence of its use in Fallujah. In fact, an independent embedded journalist, Dahr Jamail, who reported in Iraq for several months during the assault of Fallujah and the Iraq War, mentioned in his testimony that Americans did not allow them into areas in Fallujah like Julan, where there was heavy fighting and areas where napalm was used (Holmes 2007, p. 72). Later on page 188, within the same scene, an American corporate woman tries to explain the difference between Napalm-B and the alleged Mark 77 used in Fallujah. She describes the preference for such weaponry because they do “a better job” and ascertains her firm was producing more ammunition for the US Marine Corps. Napalm is often massively used by generals in war because it is considered militarily effective (Rosert 2019, p. 84). It was extensively used in Fallujah.

Corporate Spokeswoman (ONSCREEN): The difference? Napalm-B is Mark 47; slightly different chemicals, and contains oxidisers, which make it harder to extinguish than Napalm-B. In short, Mark 77 does the job better. Here at Rock Island Arsenal, in Illinois, our facility is currently producing a further 500 Mark 77s for the US Marine Corps (Holmes 2007, p. 188).

Fallujah also exposes other narratives pertaining to the reasons behind the war in Iraq. Initially, the Iraq invasion alluded to Saddam Hussein’s proprietorship of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This grand narrative was proven false and ironic because the ones behind the invasion were the ones who possessed WMD. In testimonies recorded in Jonathan Holmes’ Fallujah before the play, it is mentioned and clarified that no such weapons existed in Iraq, and the incursion and occupation of Iraq and the succeeding assault on Fallujah were based on other political agendas and not the narrative fed to the general public.

The reason given for invading Iraq in the first place was, infamously, that the governing regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. These claims have since proved false, and it is likely that they were never believed to be true by the high command of either the UK or the USA in the first place. To compound this crime, the US forces, in ‘liberating’ Fallujah, have made extensive use of chemical weapons prohibited by international treaty, and which they themselves later claimed not to have used. In its assault, the US military used both white phosphorous and napalm (Holmes 2007, p. 131).

The postmodern condition in Fallujah refutes several grand narratives, not just the narratives claiming that napalm was not used in Iraq and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the knowledge revealed by the play indicates gross human rights violations in Iraq and breaches of international conventions on war and peacekeeping initiatives. Fallujah helps the audience acknowledge that knowledge is always created within specific settings to achieve particular agendas and uses specific linguistic practices to enhance these agendas (Lyotard n.d., p. 4). The audience and the general public are made aware of the flaws in the grand narratives they were fed, which they believed to be valid through the play, based on eyewitness accounts of the war and its impact on those who affected the war, those who participated in it as it unfolded, and the victims of the war including those who were helping victims of the war. This enhanced the use of language games and paralogues in the Fallujah play.

According to Lyotard, language games refer to the social construct around language use that establishes and guides how language is used in communication, and what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable within a particular society (Lyotard n.d., p. 2); “a language game is a social construct that establishes guidelines for language use and what is acceptable and unacceptable within a given society. It follows that there are various truths and no single truth” (Lyotard n.d., p. 2).

Lyotard adopts Wittgenstein’s concept of language games to arrive at the Lyotardian concept of paralogy (Ammar et al. 2022, p. 68). By speaking, one participates in language games whose primary aim is to create new and ever-changing social knowledge (Ajvazi 2021, p. 3). Such discursive interchanges of verbatim drama may be fruitfully understood in light of Lyotard’s idea of language games; in Fallujah, this splintered glass antagonism anticipates the role of language in generating knowledge and in contesting what is thinkable as knowledge (Niesche 2022, p. 2017). On the other hand, “paralogues” are linguistic games that subvert prominent discourses or grand narratives, undermining established power hierarchies within a particular society (Lyotard n.d., p. 2). Fallujah has numerous language games—those of civilians, corporations, American officials, and aides in the war, as well as those of the soldiers.

For example, in Act 2, Scene 7, Rana’s narration of the evidence of napalm use in Fallujah is a language game based on an eyewitness account. In contrast, the Pentagon Spokesman’s denial of napalm use is a language game propagated with political intention and spin, refuting facts while taking no responsibility for proving whether or not napalm was used in Fallujah. In scene 13, which stages a press briefing in Baghdad, the General’s language game dismisses news stations like Al-Jazeera for live coverage of events as they unfolded in Fallujah, claiming that it was inaccurate and vicious. The General’s language game can be understood as an attempt to prevent the world from knowing the factual accounts of events in Fallujah by gagging the media and banning them from sharing the actual accounts of the US involvement in the assault of Fallujah.

Second Journalist: General, we have heard reports that members of the press have been prevented from reporting and that news channels have been shut down. Could you comment?

General: Al-Jazeera was responsible for vicious and inaccurate reporting. The channel was inciting hatred and had to be closed down.

Second Journalist: And the others?

General: Look, the stations that are showing Americans killing women and children are not legitimate news sources.

Second Journalist: And if people come across such footage, if it gets reported, if they see what’s happening here, what should we tell them?

General: Tell them to change the channel.

(Holmes 2007, p. 177)

Condoleezza Rice also plays a language game to make the US appear innocent, just like the General wants a portrayal of a friendly and innocent US Military in Fallujah. In the language game employed in the excerpt below, Rice attempts to justify America’s actions in Iraq, claiming that some governments make both right and wrong choices and acts for their people and those of the world. From one point of view, she justifies that America is right in waging war on Iraq and, hence, is innocent. From a different perspective, the language game portrays the Iraqi government (regime) on the wrong side. Therefore, America’s actions can be justified to serve the interests of the world’s people beyond Iraq.

America cannot impose its vision on the world—yet, we will use our influence to favour freedom. There are right and wrong choices and right and wrong acts. And governments are making them every day for their own people and for the people of the world. We can never let the intricacies of cloistered debate—with its many hues of grey and nuance—obscure the need to speak and act with moral clarity. We must recognise that some states or leaders will never be reformed. And we must recognise that such regimes must be confronted, not coddled. It is not the people we fight; it is the regime (Holmes 2007, p. 185).

The General uses language games to depict the media as reporting inaccurate accounts of the events in Fallujah, thereby undermining the media’s established power to keep the outside world informed. Such examples show that no single language game can claim to represent the complete truth because each is based on the established language use guidelines employed by various groups like government officials, civilians and the military (Lyotard n.d., p. 315). Paralogues and language games in Fallujah offer fragmented, contingent views of what actually transpired during Fallujah’s assault, creating the “Differend” in the play.

The Differend arises when parties cannot agree on discourse conventions due to fundamental variances in language games resulting from the breakdown of big narratives (Lyotard n.d., p. 9). The Differend represents an attempt to answer questions concerning the relations between heterogeneous language games (Burdman 2020, p. 311). It is the point of difference where the differing sides engage in language games by speaking radically different languages, whereby the dispute cannot be phrased using words or phrases of either language without prejudging the issue in context for a particular side (Taylor 2020, p. 421). In Scene 7, where Rana narrates evidence of napalm use while the Pentagon Spokesman denies the use of napalm in Fallujah, the Differend issues arise because both sides are speaking different language games about napalm—one side claims its use while the other denies it.

Rana (ONSCREEN): The evidence I’ve seen about that; I mean, I’ve seen it, not even someone told me about it. When I went looking for a woman, left with a blind old man in the house, we enter into the house, start calling her—no reply… but I just noticed something in the garden and it was a body but I couldn’t really recognize it, and it looked really bad—it was a body with the color green, and I have never seen this in all my life, and my work is dealing with dead bodies and this stuff, but I never seen a body with a green colour.

Pentagon Spokesman (ONSCREEN): Napalm has not been used in Iraq…

(Holmes 2007, p. 190)

The Differend acknowledges the existence of something unpresentable that the system cannot fully grasp because it may be incriminating, leading it to pass self-judgment on it (Hui 2020, p. 134). Ultimately, this creates a push-and-pull effect because the point of difference is the napalm used in Fallujah. Ultimately, the sublime shards of evidence in the play, such as fully understanding the entire historical event, are limited by people’s understanding of various events that occurred during the assault on Fallujah.

The “sublime,” in Lyotardian Postmodernism, questions how people perceive the world and fit into it, invoking the use of judgment to acknowledge the limitation of people’s understanding of several events, henceforth inhibiting complete knowledge of such events (Lyotard n.d., p. 6). The sublime is aroused by the discordance that exists between imagination and reason pertaining to the respect for reason, with imagination focusing on presentation, while reason focuses on the idea (Burdman 2020, p. 311). It implies shock and respect (Hui 2020, p. 134). The soldiers know they have engaged in atrocities of war in Fallujah, and they are affected. Still, they cannot find the exact words to express the shock of realising what happened and what they willingly participated in.

Soldier 3: I mean, what do people think happens when they tell us to assault a city? Marines don’t shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people. I mean, people want their steak, but they don’t wanna hear how the cow gets slaughtered, you know, see the blood?

Soldier 2: Once you’d reached the objective, and once you’d shot them and you’re moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You don’t want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you’re fighting, and you’re so terrified, you can’t really convey the feeling, but you don’t want them to live.

Soldier 3: At night, you think about all the people you killed. It just never gets off your head; none of this stuff does. There’s no chance to forget it…

(Holmes 2007, p. 196)

The Sublime in this scene concerns how soldiers acknowledge their participation in the atrocities of the battles of Fallujah, but do not want to present it in a way that passes judgment on themselves. It is something that happened; they live with the war’s effects but find it hard to acknowledge their own actions. Instead, Soldier 3 presents a picture of something that both the soldiers and those who sent them to war refuse to acknowledge. He says that those who sent them to the war want to see it happen, but do not want to know how it unfolds. War is about bloodshed and not niceties. Jonathan Holmes achieves a sublime effect and creates the postmodern condition by using intertextuality to elaborate the message effectively in the Fallujah play.

“Intertextuality” in the Lyotardian postmodern perspective concerns the relationships among texts—how they influence, reference, and are influenced by one another, affecting and shaping people’s perceptions of the world. The verbatim method that Holmes employs in Fallujah is quite dependent on what Lyotard would term “testimonial intertextuality” (Lyotard n.d., p. 10), which is a network of intersecting discourses pulled upon resources from the media, political utterances, and eyewitness narratives. This intertextual overlay undermines the power of an individual narration of the war. It acknowledges and references previous texts, creating a connection between the past and the present (Ayar 2022, p. 185). In Fallujah, Jonathan Holmes uses testimonies of eyewitnesses to the assault of Fallujah and interviews with US officials like Condoleezza Rice and the US General. The character of Sasha in the play adopts a composite figure, appearing in most scenes to interview and report on events in Fallujah. All responses given in the play to her interviews are verbatim and taken from identified sources.

Sasha: This is what I found in Fallujah. The Iraqi National Guard used loudspeakers to call on people to get out of the houses carrying white flags, bringing all their belongings with them… Eyad’s father was shot in the heart and his mother in the chest.

(Holmes 2007, p. 193)

The distinction between journalism, witness testimony and dramatic fiction fails here. The report by Sasha adopts the rhetorical stance of a field correspondent and incorporates word-for-word recollections of the Iraqi civilians. The combination of real-life explanations, as exemplified by the performance, illustrates Lyotard’s idea of knowledge development in the postmodern condition: a plurality of language games. Intertextuality serves not only as a stylistic device but also as a means of conveying the truth in Holmes’ dramaturgy, which preannulates the mediation of reality through competing discourse registers. Fallujah incorporates statements from the public domain that can be easily accessed on the internet, such as speeches, military briefings and televised interviews, which are meticulously organised to create the play (Holmes 2007, p. 143). Intertextuality is closely associated with pastiche in Fallujah, helping the audience connect the past to the present and creating a better understanding of the play and what transpired during the assault of Fallujah.

“Pastiche” in the Lyotardian postmodernism enables the blending of various components from different cultural sources to create a new piece of literature (Lyotard n.d., p. 11). Within Lyotard’s postmodern perspective, the disintegration of big narratives and the widespread sense of cultural fragmentation make pastiche more possible in verbatim plays like Fallujah. Pastiche aims to merge previous related texts and highlight numerous portions of the play (Ayar 2022, p. 188). Examples of pastiche in Fallujah include the character of Sasha, who imitates journalism within the play to highlight specific events as they unfold in Fallujah. Her kind of journalism is unfazed, courageous investigative journalism that aims to depict events as they were in Fallujah despite the US General’s claim that news sources like Sasha’s were “… not legitimate news sources” (Holmes 2007, p. 177).

In Scene 13, Sasha interviews the US General during a press briefing in Baghdad. It is a common journalism technique to get information about an incident.

Sasha: General, in view of the bombings in Madrid last month and the decision of the Spanish and other governments to remove troops from Iraq, just how genuinely multinational is the coalition force at present?

General: We stand shoulder to shoulder with many allies; there are troops of all nationalities here with us.

Sasha: Yes, but excluding the private contractors—how many sovereign forces are currently in the country? I saw you in a discussion…

General: That was our ally, the Moldovan General.

(Holmes 2007, p. 176)

In Scene 22, she starts with a report of her findings in Fallujah before interviewing a doctor to provide a more precise narration of events there.

Sasha: This is what I found in Fallujah. The Iraqi National Guard used loudspeakers to call on people to get out of the houses carrying white flags, bringing all their belongings with them. They were ordered to gather outside near the Jamal al Furkan Mosque in the centre of town. Eight members of Eyad Naji Latif’s family—on them a six-month-old child—gathered their belongings and walked in single file, as instructed, to the mosque…

Doctor (interviewed by Sasha): Then the firing began. US soldiers appeared on the roofs of surrounding houses and opened fire. Eyad’s father was shot in the heart and his mother in the chest…

(Holmes 2007, p. 193)

In both scenes, Sasha blends different components of journalism culture to highlight specific events in Fallujah. When she reports as a journalist, she does so from her perspective of what she witnessed. She then interviews the US General to gather information about the war, asking leading questions to get the information needed to explain the situation in Fallujah. In Scene 22, she allows narrations from those who witnessed the battle in Fallujah to describe what they saw. The doctor provides an elaborate explanation, building on Sasha’s introductory report. In so doing, the character of Sasha fragments what the public knew about the assault on Fallujah.

“Fragmentation” in postmodernism involves the disintegration of culture and civilisation, and this often happens through migration and globalisation (Lyotard n.d., p. 12). In Fallujah, fragmentation is evident in the massive displacement of people in the wake of the battles of Fallujah. Testimony accounts like those by Dahr Jamail illustrate how fragmentation led to risks such as distrust and increased “security” checkpoints during the war.

Fallujah… is 70 per cent bombed to the ground, no water, no electricity. People who want to go back into that city have to get retina scans, all ten fingers fingerprinted, then, they’re issued with an ID card. People inside the city are referring to it as a big jail. It is a horrendous situation, and we still have hundreds of thousands of refugees as a result (Holmes 2007, p. 130).

The war turned many Fallujans into refugees, fragmenting Fallujah’s sense of unity that had existed before the beginning of the war. Families were split; children watched as their parents were killed, and parents watched as their children were brutally slain. The misuse of children in the war was also common, and we could also see that the Mujahedin were also exploiting this. (Khadim 2022, p. 84). Saad, an eleven-year-old Mujahedin, checks and secures the road for Jo and the rest before assuring them of their safety (Holmes 2007, p. 206). The war greatly fragmented the Fallujan society and significantly affected their ways of living before the Iraq War and the subsequent battles in Fallujah. As the play unfolds, Jonathan Holmes presents irony in diverse contexts, albeit subtly.

Jonathan Holmes makes extensive use of irony in Fallujah. Postmodern “irony” disproves ideas that a single universal truth exists and is known and comprehended by everyone (Lyotard n.d., p. 14). Ironically, US spokespersons and government leaders contradict fact-based evidence from eyewitnesses like Rana and Jo.

Rana (ONSCREEN): And I later met a guy with experience in these things, and he says this is the chemical weapons that they use… They use these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then, small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. Pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burned people’s skin even when water was dumped on their bodies. People suffered so much from these, both civilians and fighters alike. There is a terrible crime going on in Fallujah, and they do not want anybody to know.

(Holmes 2007, p. 188)

Dr. Rice: Today, on bended knee, I thank the good Lord for protecting those of our troops overseas and our coalition troops and innocent Iraqis who suffer at the hands of some of [p. 217] these senseless killings by people who are trying to shake our will.

(Holmes 2007, p. 218)

These excerpts from the play are ironic. While Dr Rice expresses gratitude for the protection of American troops overseas and innocent Iraqis, Rana’s testimony portrays evidence of a lack of protection, depicting the brutality and inhumanity of American troop operations in Fallujah. Ironically, Dr Rice terms the killings as senseless, yet American troops conduct them. The irony in Fallujah brings about playfulness, in which Jonathan Holmes creates a sense of pleasure by exploring different cultural forms and practices, making the play both entertaining and informative at the same time. When Jo is kidnapped, it is ironic that she creates balloon animals in such a tense situation instead of worrying about her safety and those with her when they were abducted.

Lyotardian “playfulness” involves discovering pleasure and happiness through the exploration of cultural forms and practices (Lyotard n.d., p. 13). Jo best brings out Fallujah’s playfulness. She creates balloon animals in tense situations in an attempt to alleviate anxiety and fear of the unknown. Culturally, children are known and expected to play with balloons, not adults. Nevertheless, Jo explores balloons as a coping mechanism for tension, pressure, and fear of the unknown.

Jo: (trying to be courageous): It will not help if you kill us. You know that… A minute; do you have children? (Man hesitates. Slowly, Jo pulls from her pocket a balloon. Expertly, she blows it up and twists it into a balloon animal before offering it to the man. They both stare at it for a moment).

(Holmes 2007, p. 180)

This playfulness is both ironic and satirical because the situation exposes contradictions in social and political systems. The man who kidnapped Jo was expected to be harsh and brutal to those he had kidnapped and to use them for their benefit, possibly. Instead, he protects them and even engages them in conversation. On the other hand, Jo, amid the tension of the situation, opts to engage in satirical talk, asking about the man’s family to distract both of them from the stark, uncertain reality.

According to Lyotard, “satire” involves critiquing and exposing hypocrisies and contradictions in political and social systems (Lyotard n.d., p. 14). It is a significant tool for fighting the pervasive commodification of information in the postmodern society. Examples of satire in Fallujah include the scene at the clinic where the Iraqi Doctor mentions they had informed the American Marines of the hospital having all foreign aid and medical supplies, so they would not bomb these facilities. It is satirical that the American commanders went ahead to bomb these facilities and target ambulances and doctors.

Doctor: In the first week of the siege, they bombed the Hay Nazal clinic. This contained all the foreign aid and medical instruments we had. All the US military commanders knew this because we told them about it, so they wouldn’t bomb it. But this was one of the clinics bombed, and in the first week of the siege, they bombed it two times. Of course, they targeted all our ambulances and doctors…

(Holmes 2007, p. 201)

It was hypocritical of the US military commanders to bomb health facilities that contained all the foreign aid, medical supplies and instruments meant to help victims of the battles of Fallujah. Ultimately, both Fallujans and the US military were to benefit from such supplies. The mere act of bombing revealed that the Americans were intent on destroying Fallujah to the ground, contradicting earlier claims of peacekeeping. Such acts introduced parody in Fallujah.

Unlike satire, postmodern “parody” is humorous and purposeful, impersonating a particular style and embracing diversity and hybridity of cultural forms (Lyotard n.d., p. 15). Parody challenges the legitimacy of one speech and worldview. It calls for the reinterpretation of an earlier written text, ironically, to draw attention to a particular occurrence throughout a verbatim play, henceforward creating awareness in a way that entertains the audience (Ayar 2022):

Postmodern parody is used as a device to reinterpret formerly written texts in an ironic manner to draw attention to certain occurrences throughout the plot. As is the case in postmodern literature, several writers of the period mastered the use of parody in their works and presented events to create awareness in an entertaining way. This literary device gives the reader a chance to rethink specific occasions more intensively from an objective perspective. The device also allows for the creation of new meaning (186).

Examples of “parody” in Fallujah include the scene at the clinic where the Doctor mocks the US policy in Iraq when the US commanders bombed clinics that had medical supplies and foreign aid. Another example of parody in Fallujah is in Scene 4, where the US Colonel mentions how generals love napalm: “US Colonel (ONSCREEN): We napalmed those bridges. Unfortunately, there were people there. It’s no great way to die. The generals love napalm; it has a big psychological effect” (Holmes 2007, p. 163).

This scene highlights the mocking tone of the US Colonel and the generals’ love for napalm during the war, casually mentioning why the generals love napalm. The speech of the US Colonel is highlighted for criticism of the use of napalm in Iraq, a claim that the American leaders vehemently denied in Fallujah. Parody thus creates ground for deconstruction in Fallujah.

According to Lyotard, “deconstruction” in the postmodern perspective involves challenging prevailing narratives to reveal underlying presumptions, hierarchies and paradoxes ingrained in language (Lyotard n.d., p. 12). Deconstruction contends that the erasure that takes place during the process of writing determines the feasibility of writing history: “Deconstruction insists that the possibility of writing history depends upon the effacement of the event of inscription.” (Taylor 2020, p. 416). In Fallujah, deconstruction is evident in various forms, like in the excerpt below, in which Rana and her team were taking the wounded Fallujans out of Fallujah for medical attention in a van:

Rana: So, we get the ambulance through the checkpoint, and suddenly we are surrounded by Iraqis, guns pointing, ready to shoot, shouting, ‘You are traitors; you are taking Americans wounded to the hospital!’ I mean, in a shot-up van! And the wounded say, ‘Hey! We are Fallujans. Which Americans are you talking about? The Americans evacuate the wounded by helicopter, not in vans like these! What are you talking about?’ So, we got through.

(Holmes 2007, p. 208)

The prevailing narratives in this scene are that wounded Americans are the ones taken to the hospital while wounded Fallujans are left to die. Henceforth, those in the rescue missions are perceived as traitors. Another example of deconstruction is the US Colonel explaining why generals love napalm. US Colonel (ONSCREEN): “We napalmed those bridges. Unfortunately, there were people there. It’s no great way to die. The generals love napalm; it has a big psychological effect” (Holmes 2007, p. 163). In Scene 7, the Pentagon spokesperson disputes dropping napalm in Iraq.

Pentagon Spokesman (ONSCREEN): Napalm has not been used in Iraq. We use Mark 77 incendiary. The US took napalm out of service in the 1970s. We completed the destruction of our last batch of napalm on 4 April 2001 and no longer maintain any stocks of napalm (Holmes 2007, p. 170).

While the US Colonel in Scene 4 acknowledges they used napalm in Iraq, the Pentagon Spokesman refutes these claims, yet there exists evidence of napalm use. Only by employing deconstruction can someone challenge the prevailing narratives about napalm use in Iraq. These narratives call for self-reflexivity, denying the rigid or stable identity one may assume during the play.

“Self-reflexivity” in Lyotardian postmodernity denies the rigid or stable identity of people, treating identity as continuously changing, requiring people to be in constant consideration of their identities and how they are formed as they relate to others (Lyotard n.d., p. 20). In Fallujah, self-reflexivity happens in numerous instances, including at the checkpoint where Iraqis point guns at the van in which Rana and wounded Fallujans were travelling, forcing those people to re-identify themselves as Fallujans: “Hey! We are Fallujans” (Holmes 2007, p. 208). The battles of Fallujah affected people’s identities to the extent that they had to reintroduce themselves to prove which side they were on in the war.

In Scene 6, Jo and Rana are placed in a situation where they must thoroughly consider their identities and how their relationship with others forms them. In this scene, they are carrying medical supplies and are using a new ambulance when open fire ricochets around them. Jo shouts to identify themselves to the soldiers, scolding them in an angry outburst.

Jo: Hold your fire! We’re here to deliver medical supplies and a new ambulance! I’m English! The vehicle you will see is a new ambulance; it’s safe! (Bullets ricochet around them; they dart back to the wall and wait. The shooting stops).

Jo: Stop shooting! I know you can hear me! We’re meant to be on the same side for Christ’s sake! These supplies need to get through—people are dying! (They edge out again…before the shooting starts again; heavier fire than before…)

Jo: (furious): You fuckers! If it were your sister in there, would you still shoot at us? If it were your apple-pie, Mom, would you stop us delivering medicine?

(Holmes 2007, p. 169)

Although the idea of self-reflexivity in Fallujah prefigures the play’s consciousness of its representational boundaries and ethical imbroglio, it also sets the stage for Holmes’s further elaboration of chaos as a form of creation. The characters’ self-awareness fails to produce some coherence but, instead, provides the revelation of the instability of the mea—ning in the fragmented theatre of war. This self-doubting indecision breaks down any pretence of telling the story in a manner that incorporates chaos and contingency into the drama stage. This results in Fallujah shifting out of self-conscious analysis to an aesthetic of unpredictability, the welcome of randomness, in which accidental and disjointed forms have become dominant tools for expressing postmodern truth.

The “embrace of randomness” in postmodernity involves disrupting established hierarchies and power structures to introduce elements of chance and unpredictability (Lyotard n.d., p. 13). Fallujah’s plot, setting, and structure convey a sense of embracing randomness. The scenes do not appear to be sequential, as the events of the Fallujah assault occurred in real life. The prologue and epilogue embrace randomness, as the audience, pre-viewing the play, remains uncertain about its action, resulting in a highly unpredictable sequence of events. Jo describes, in a voiceover, the random thoughts one may have during a kidnapping in the kidnapping scene. She leaves everything to chance and fickleness, choosing to focus on those she has been captured with because she knows there is nothing she can do about the situation while still in the captor’s hostage. The chaotic scenes and the sudden shifts in emotion, reminiscent of the anarchy of war, reflect further randomness in Fallujah. Instead of a linear, cause-and-effect structure, contingency and disorder are permitted to dictate the manner in which the events unfold in the play. For instance, Sasha says: “You look at the city now—just dust and smoke. You see children playing among bones, laughing, like nothing happened.” (Holmes 2007, p. 195). This photograph epitomises a postmodern interest in the randomness of things; how innocence and horror are in balance, without a rational correlation between them. This extravagant placement of the imagery and Holmes’s lack of narrative preparation demonstrate Lyotard’s concept of incredulity toward metanarratives, in which the apparatus is given more prominence than resolution. Children’s laughter amidst the ruins defies moral or ideological cliches of sentimental pity. Still, it reminds us of the absurdity of the contrast between trauma and normality, which is something that cannot be condemned or moralised. In this regard, the representation of Fallujah undermines representational stability, reflecting the unpredictable nature of violence in the real world. Accordingly, these anarchic discontinuities that characterise Holmes’s adoption of randomness are almost immediately transformed into an anti-realist aesthetic, where the incoherence of order is not restricted to structure but confronts the possibility of detecting and describing truth. These create anti-realism in the play.

Postmodern “anti-realism” rejects the notion of a single objective reality apart from human perception, since such a reality is always fractured (Lyotard n.d., p. 16). Thus, postmodernity puts into doubt the position of grand narratives, calling for their re-reading and re-interpretation of these narratives (Gyökér 2020, p. 3). In Fallujah, anti-realism is evident when an American Lieutenant remarks on his thoughts about eradicating all the bad guys, only to discover they had not. To the Americans, the “bad guys” were the Fallujan insurgents, and they targeted anyone who was not on the American side as their enemies. In reality, the enemies in Fallujah were the Americans who had invaded, occupied and assaulted Fallujans under the guise of peacekeeping. In this case, nothing exists as reality; instead, every notion arises from the language games played by the participants (Awan and Ahmad 2019, p. 187). The language game of this American lieutenant identifies the Iraqis as the bad guys who need to be eliminated. “Lieutenant: When we hit the mosque, I thought we had killed all the bad guys, but when we went in, they didn’t find any bad guys in the building” (Holmes 2007, p. 19).

Another way Holmes employs anti-realism to disorient the audience is by disrupting their perceptions and beliefs about what is true. Instead of presenting war as spectacle or documentary, Fallujah reveals the underlying truth that disrupts appearance, challenges people’s beliefs, and questions their knowledge. US Sniper: “Sometimes you don’t even know who you’re shooting at—shadows, maybe. They tell us they’re insurgents, but who the hell knows?” (Holmes 2007, p. 186). The sniper’s doubt illustrates Lyotard’s concept that reality in postmodernity is constructed through discursive systems that cannot assert themselves of universality. The soldier’s scepticism is introduced to challenge the illusion of clarity that realism offers. There is no abandonment of the reference to facts in the anti-realism of Holmes, but the subject of the ideology and fear reveals the mediation of facts. In this dissociation between perception and imagination, the play fails to provide the reader with a coherent moral perspective; instead, it vividly illustrates a world constantly burdened by rhetoric and trauma.

The fact that Holmes denies the ontological status of mimetic realism makes possible the hybridisation where photographic, political rhetoric, and theatrical performance can co-exist to create new, unstable modalities for registering the disjointed truths of war. Postmodern culture is characterised by the “hybridisation” of various information and artistic genres, which resists traditional categorisation and creates blended and entwined literary genres (Lyotard n.d., p. 4). Fallujah blends traditional news reporting, interviews and verbatim from speeches and briefings to create something new and unique that resists traditional categorisation. It cannot be described as conventional fictional theatre because it is based on actual accounts of events depicted on stage as they happened in real life. It cannot be referred to as mere reporting of the Fallujah battles and their aftermath because it does more than provide reports of what happened. While it incorporates some artistic installations to enhance authenticity on stage, it cannot be categorised as a fictional theatre because it is based on accurate accounts of the Fallujah assault and its impacts. However, it is this hybridity, which intermingles fact with performance and encoding differences between authenticity and fabrication, that tends to produce a certain air of paranoia and distrust, as the restrictions between truth and manipulation continue to become tenuous in the postmodern war story of Holmes.

“Paranoia and distrust” of authority originates from people feeling influenced or controlled by authoritative figures (Lyotard n.d., p. 6). The knowledge people have conflicts with legitimacy claims attached to it, causing people to doubt and question authority. The soldiers believe they are being influenced and controlled to stay in Fallujah after they accomplished the initial mission. The mission parameters shift to peacekeeping, something they were not trained for, making them feel they are being intentionally held in Fallujah.

Soldier 2: You go and fight that war, and you win decisively, but now you have to stay and stabilise the situation. We are having to go from a full war-fighting mindset to a peacekeeping mindset overnight. Soldier 1: Right after shooting at people who were trying to kill you, you now have to help them. Soldier 2: We weren’t trained for this stuff. It makes you resentful that they’re holding us on here.

(Holmes 2007, p. 197)

Paranoia rejects perceptions of truth asserted by authoritative narratives and thus embraces a sphere of uncertainty (Nurten 2020, p. 172). Soldier 2 argues that they were still in Fallujah after fighting the whole war and now are required to perform peacekeeping, which makes them distrust authority. The authoritative narrative of the initial mission changes, casting uncertainty on the soldiers. Thus, the loss of faith in authority results from the demands for rational justification of authoritative claims (Berker and Yiğit 2019, p. 6). These soldiers seek a sensible rationale for their continued stay in Fallujah after accomplishing the initial mission of their deployment. The acts in the play help enhance the non-linearity of time in Fallujah, as the soldiers narrate events before, during and after the war in no specific time sequence, providing an opportunity to reevaluate and reinterpret the past.

In the postmodern non-linearity of time, metanarratives lose their explanatory power and relevance, and the past is not considered static but something that is continuously open to revaluation and reinterpretation in the present (Lyotard n.d., p. 17). Irrespective of the unification approach it employs, grand narratives lose credibility in the postmodern era (Ammar et al. 2022, p. 68). Thus, the past grand narratives are open to multiple interpretations because the explanatory power they once had has lost its reliability and legitimacy in postmodernism (Ashraf et al. 2020, p. 448).

This extremely thick sense of paranoia and distrust, created by the fractured logic of Holmes’s narrative, naturally spreads into the space of time in the play, making the time itself disorganised and repetitive. This disorganisation of the linear flow and the sense of historical inevitability are the hallmarks of postmodernism. An example of the non-linearity of time in Fallujah includes the impact of the war on soldiers, as shown in the excerpt below. While they had already killed people and moved on to the next thing, they struggle with posttraumatic stress disorders because of their exposure to traumatic experiences during the war, and this is what they may have to live with for their entire lifespan. Grand narratives of soldiers being able to handle war and not developing any impacts are deconstructed in this scene, as some of the very soldiers struggle to sleep because of the images that keep playing in their minds long after the heinous crimes they commit in the assault of Fallujah.

Soldier 2: Once you’d reached the objective, and once you’d shot them and you’re moving through, anything there, you shoot again… You hate them so bad while you’re fighting, and you’re so terrified, you can’t really convey their feelings, but you don’t want them to live.

Soldier 3: At night, you think about all the people you killed. It just never gets off your head; none of this stuff does. There’s no chance to forget it…

Soldier 1: Some soldiers don’t even, fucking, sleep at night. They sit up all fucking night long. They sit up all fucking night long doing shit to keep themselves busy—to keep their minds off this fucking stuff…

(Holmes 2007, p. 196)

Another example of the non-linearity of time in Fallujah concerns the invasion’s rationale. Initially, it was based on the metanarrative that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. This turns out to be untruthful, and then suddenly, the American troops are the peacekeepers. Reading through how the script changes, the postmodern analysis of Fallujah depicts that America had vested interests in Iraq, and it needed a narrative to justify its illegal invasion, occupation and subsequent assault of Iraqi towns like Fallujah. These metanarratives were based on totalizing perspectives and reasons for the war. Disrupting the chronological continuity and breaking down the perception of time, the non-linear structure of Holmes does suffice to reflect the psychological drift of war, but also predestines the more critical analysis of the metanarratives of totalisation that aim to bring order and sanity to the dystopia of lived experience.

“Metanarratives of totalization” posit a tendency toward totalizing a system or structure to command and control the entire human experience by downplaying the complexities of social reality and diversity (Lyotard n.d., p. 19). The postmodern condition is a disruption in the claims of totality (Farhan 2019, p. 6). Metanarratives of totalization in Fallujah include Condoleezza Rice’s speech at Sanford

Rice: … As a professor, I recognise that these debates enliven our conferences and our classrooms. [laughter.] I have participated in them, myself… [Laughter.] But as a policymaker, I can tell you that they obscure reality. Power matters. Great powers matter. Great powers matter because they can influence international stability for good or ill due to their size, influence and will. Great powers never have and never will just mind their own business within their borders.

(Holmes 2007, p. 184)

In this speech, Condoleezza Rice argues for the totalization of the human experience grounded in the metanarrative of America as a great power capable of shaping international stability. This metanarrative is unbending because America is not Iraq, and there is a need for flexibility and an open-ended strategy when dealing with other sovereign states, because Iraq’s sovereignty and structure are independent of the US. These metanarratives of totalization give suitable grounds for deconstruction and the emergence of metanarratives of emancipation in Fallujah. Since these totalising structures that purport to contain historical truth have been exposed in Fallujah, Holmes’s critical focus also shifts to the precarious metanarratives of liberation, which legitimise the use of violence and intervention as means to emancipation.

In Lyotardian postmodernity, “metanarratives of emancipation” contend that the present world is fractured, diverse and constantly changing, thereby allowing various viewpoints on particular issues (Lyotard n.d., p. 18). Subsequently, this renders old narratives obsolete, making them no longer essential or valuable in the contemporary world. Thus, the status of knowledge in the postmodern world is altered as language games no longer have their legitimisation; instead, they are the subject of a contract, rather than explicitly stated among players (Peters 2022, p. 1934).

…the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age… make three observations about language-games: ‘Rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players’; ‘if there are no rules, there is no game’; ‘every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game’ (Peters 2022, p. 1934).

In Fallujah, “metanarratives of emancipation” encompass the various narratives behind the war. According to Rana, it is not the Americans who wage war in Fallujah, but the corporations like KFC that want people to be lazy and uneducated. This narrative frees one from merely viewing the war through the lens of America being against Iraq, but to reevaluate the roles of organisations and corporations in the war. While there might be some truth in Rana’s perspective, there is also some truth in the Americans waging war in Iraq.

Sasha: Why? I mean, why these people?

Rana: It’s the corporations; it’s not the Americans. We are in this together, against the corporations. They are working together—they want no educated people in the world; they want KFC burgers, lying watching TV. Remember, Iraq was one of the best-educated countries in the world, not just in the Middle East. We used to have free education up to university graduation, and free health care. Now, they find division where there isn’t any. The Americans bring Shia police to Fallujah, which is another way to create a civil war. And that’s it. They did it for a purpose: to bring the Shia militia to Fallujah, which is typically Sunni.

(Holmes 2007, p. 202)

Another metanarrative of emancipation is evident in the soldiers’ discussion of their participation in the war and of American culture’s celebration of war in their movies. War should not be glorified. There is a need for people to understand the boundaries between knowledge and the complexity of social realities like war (Lyotard n.d., p. 19).

Soldier 2: Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse at the reality of war, that it’s a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars… If the American public doesn’t like the violence of war, they shouldn’t be in such a rush to endorse the next one.

(Holmes 2007, p. 198)

This perspective emancipates the audience from the notion that soldiers enjoy war. Throughout the play, the audience also comes to appreciate that war is violent and should not be endorsed lightly. This serves as a critical learning point for the postmodern audience, encouraging them to seek more practical, open-ended approaches to resolving conflicts and making judgments.

Such audience consciousness of morality, of course, is also transferred to the soldiers themselves, whose personal experiences in Fallujah let readers see the psychological costs of the war beyond the ideological abstraction. In the verbatim theatre, Holmes goes out to abscond this mutual consciousness into performative self-confrontation in which telling is cathartic and critical. Verbatim theatre and dramaturgy are suitable for Fallujah because they enable soldiers to perform their war narratives as a part of their response to the war (Beck 2016, p. 123). In scene 23, the soldiers narrate their experiences of the war and how it affects them psychologically after killing people while out in combat. They discuss how roles quickly shift, and from combat, they are the ones in the peacekeeping in the same areas where they opened fire and killed people. The performance of such narratives, enabled by verbatim theatre and dramaturgy, represents the war’s traumatic aftermath not only for civilians but also for military personnel who fought in it.

Verbatim theatre and dramaturgy in Fallujah offer an opportunity to reconstruct historical events using information from public speeches and interviews with real people who either witnessed or participated in such events, thereby enabling the presentation of a realistic picture of the events that occurred (Kaur et al. 2016, p. 60). As the audience watches Fallujah, they have an opportunity to think about the situation with politics and democracy afterwards. This reflection was not possible during the war because they lacked a holistic picture of the war as it happened (Coste 2019, p. 8). Fallujah attempts to convey the 2004 assault of Fallujah and how American troops used ferocious war strategies against Fallujans to restore authority over the town, particularly in the wake of the four American contractors’ murders (Amera 2019, p. 107). However, techniques in Fallujah reveal that the battles there were more than American operations. Fallujah was one of the foremost chokeholds of Saddam’s army, and it makes sense why the American troops heavily assaulted it in response to the massacre of the four contract workers (Dagorn 2023, p. 88). The American commanders targeted guerrilla groups and Sunni resistance leaders who were in Fallujah. Condoleezza Rice’s statement opines that Fallujans were part of the targets because they [Fallujans] harboured terrorists—“we have to fight the terrorists. And that means that there can be no distinction between terrorists and those who harbour them” (Holmes 2007, p. 93).

Holmes, in the introduction to the play, admits that making a verbatim testimony play such as Fallujah is constrained, the major constraint being the playwright’s balancing of the authenticity of the Fallujah battles and theatricality (Holmes 2007, p. 141). Although the play presents interviews with soldiers, journalists, doctors, and US generals, there are instances in which the participants refuse to share their stories with the audience. In other cases, characters like military officials ask Sasha, the journalist, to turn off her recorder so they can go on with the conversation. This pattern is pre-empted by the usual opposition between telling the truth and hiding, which demonstrates the elevated ethical and epistemological dilemmas that come with writing about experienced trauma. In particular, this reluctance shows how ingrained distrust of representation is, even among individuals affiliated with military institutions, where the information is not only weaponised but also censored (Beck 2016, p. 126).

This hesitation among the subjects of Holmes reveals a vital paradox of verbatim theatre, the effort to render veritable truth on a medium that must necessarily be chosen, edited and acted. This tension—a clash between two language games, the one requiring testimonial precision and the other operating within the framework of the dramatic utterance—is an illustration of the differend in Lyotardian terminology. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the playwright to balance between the truthfulness and the need to tell a story coherently. This negotiation can often force the artist to use other, perhaps morally dubious, means to gather information and maintain the integrity of the story. There will be a thinning of the boundaries between documentary evidence and artistic interpretation in such creative interventions. Still, they are the only way to maintain the epistemic agenda of the play: to speak what official discourses hide.

Accordingly, the methodological constraints acknowledged by Holmes do not undermine Fallujah; on the contrary, they render the form of verbatim theatre more complex and heavily moral. The play’s postmodern condition paves the way for an ethical conflict between truth and artifice as the dimensions of authenticity confront the audience with the instability of truth and the artificed character of representation per se. In accepting that there is still something that cannot be known, Holmes secures Lyotard’s theory that the truth of postmodernity is never absolute but rather partial, bargained, and indeed human.

The restrictions, however, are ironically the foundation of Fallujah’s artistic and philosophical strength. Instead of hiding that testimony is left incomplete, Holmes preempts it as a formal and allegorical tool, making silence, fragmentation, and omission instruments for telling the truth. This does not mean that knowledge of war is biased, institutionalised, or even repressed; in this case, the non-toxicity—the recordings’ rejection—is the division of reference knowledge of war. Through this, Holmes offers constructive commentary, finding that it is a tool of power and distrust, even in the act of documenting something. At the dramaturgical level, theists must provide the missing information, and their creative activity involves filling these gaps with dialogue excerpts, onscreen testimony, and interrupted interviews. The lack of a coherent or continuous narrative in the play fits Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern condition, in which the breakdown of a grand narrative leads to a polyphonic, localised truth. What would be disadvantageous to the verbatim procedure, however, is that restricted access, biased narration, and ethical grey areas eventually turn out to be the most authentic of Fallujah, beckoning to the viewer to see the indecision in its light. Ethically constrained in this manner marks aesthetic creativity, and the theatre becomes a place where unambiguous answers are not to be found. However, moral inquiry and ethical awareness still exist.

This is the moral awakening of the audience, which has a counterpart in the process of confrontation and self-realisation that the ex-soldiers experience throughout their lives, showing the mental and moral weight of the war action that propaganda does not reflect. Therefore, by the conventions of verbatim theatre and dramaturgy, Holmes turns performance into a form of catharsis, using it as a means of critical re-evaluation of the human effects of the war. Re-enacted testimonies of lived stories in the form of verbatim performance are therefore much more than theatrical representations. They are developed into an ethical dialogue between art, memory, and responsibility. With both practitioners and audience put in the precarious position between being a viewer and a collaborator, Fallujah offers a postmodern ethical encounter, in which judgment is elucidated as understanding and the theatre becomes a communicative zone of collective ethical inquiry. This shift from the mode of representation to the mode of responsibility provides a fitting conclusion to the play’s critique of war discourses that the play offers. It predetermines the final evaluation of its sustaining moral importance.

6. Conclusions

In conclusion, Fallujah by Jonathan Holmes is an awe-inspiring piece of Lyotardian postmodernity, where the theatre is akin to the epistemological counterpoint to the problem and the moralised trail of thought. Due to the manner in which Holmes instigates the practices of the verbatim theatre and dramaturgy, the illusion of historical continuum is shattered, and the fissures that exist between the testifying, ideology and power are exposed. Fallujah converts the anarchy of the Iraq War into a multidimensional discourse of truth, legitimacy, and human suffering through the play of the language games, paralogy, and the differend. All the disjunctive voices of the soldier and the civilian, the journalist or the politician, have conspired in the stakes of the contestation of the dominant discourses, which comprises the belief in a form of knowledge opposing the unitary and assertive descriptions of the truth.

This aesthetic hybridity of the play, comprising documentary veracity, the rhetoric of politics, and performative reconstruction, thereby brings into focus the wobblingness of the very art of representation. In this manner, Holmes not only turns the limitations of verbatim theatre into the assets of dramaturgical practice but also repurposes silence, omission and contradiction into postmodern criticism. Ethical responsibility in witnessing is already predetermined in this artistic model, as the audience must not merely observe but actively participate in the truth-rebuilding operations in a very critical manner. Fallujah in such a way redefines the meaning of theatre as a stage of inquisitive and ethical scepticism, with no truth or false truth, but only interpretive plurality. And, last but not least, Fallujah by Holmes could be taken as an example of the impact of postmodern theatre in subverting the metanarratives of totalisation and emancipation, illustrating the multiple relations between power relations and knowledge, and their representation. This refusal to bring decisiveness, which constitutes the dramatisation of the play of its openness, fragmentation and moral ambiguity, is the postmodern condition of the world in the sense that the best justice to do everything is not to render everything knowable in some way but to accept the permanent insubordination of the unpresentable and the unheard. Fallujah remains, in these terms, an ethical document, a philosophical act, and the process of providing the theatre with its most vital work: the remembrance, interrogation and witnessing of the unspeakable truths of war.