The Great Game at the Tricycle

Afghanistan is one of those places in the world that really knows about the funny way history has of repeating itself. Very early on in the Tricycle's series of Afghan plays, The Great Game, Stephen Jeffreys gives us a bunch of British soldiers worrying about what they're doing in that rocky, inhospitable country when money is so stretched at home, and neither the British nor Afghan people really want them there. What's so interesting is that these soldiers are speaking not in 2009, but in 1842.

Jeffreys' Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad is the first of a series of plays at the Tricycle, all of which can be seen in one endurance test of a day, or broken up over several days. It's an impressive feat of theatre, featuring a cast of fifteen who juggle dozens of roles scattered across history. What's especially noteworthy – and perhaps to be expected of the Tricycle – is that many of these plays get across information about the history and traditions of this place without sounding like a lecture.

That said, a copy of the programme is an invaluable resource before going in. It's packed with background information about significant events and people, without which it would be easy to get very lost amid the swirling robes and procession of upright though potentially dubious Westerners traipsing through Afghanistan.

That seems to have been the thing with Afghanistan over the years: foreign intervention/interference (depending on your viewpoint). Foreign powers – ie. Britain, Russia/USSR, America – just can't leave her alone. Sandwiched as she was between the British Raj in India and the might of Czarist Russia, Afghanistan has been faced with the choice of the hug of the bear or the claws of the lion (as Paul Battacharjee's Amir Abdur Rahman explains in Ron Hutchinson's Durand's Line) for generations. While the Russian threat from the north has remained, Pakistan's role as a key US ally in the War on Terror – as well as the Cold War and the Pakistani secret service's continued interest in the country – means that the threat from the south has merely changed from British to American and American-funded Pakistani.

Of course, the question remains of whether the foreign presence is interference or intervention. Often, it seems that foreigners are helping Afghans to advance their society to Western levels, but the Afghans don't want to Westernisation that goes along with that. Alternatively, they've also been offered the chance to advance along Soviet Communist lines, and the locals rejected that too. Afghanistan comes across as a country keen to retain it sown identity in the middle of countries vying for control there, or at least ensuring no one else can control it.

One audience member complained that The Great Game lacks balance, asking where the voice of the Taliban was. Colin Teevan's The Lion of Kabul provides that voice, as a chilling counterpoint to JT Rogers' earlier Blood and Gifts, in which a Rick Warden's shadowy CIA operative funds and arms Vincent's Ebrahim's mujahideen fighters against the Soviets. The later play shows the victorious Taliban administering justice according to their own warped version of Islam – but a way that's pretty much consistent with what they preach throughout The Great Game. By the end (Simon Stephens' Canopy of Stars), it's clear why Tom McKay's northern British Army Sergeant wants to return there to defend the people from fundamentalists who spray acid in girls' eyes to stop them going to school.

Obviously, with so much scope, some parts of this festival of Afghan study are going to be stronger than others. While Ron Hutchinson's Durand's Line is a tightly-packed, poetic masterpiece centred on the artificial division of land between Afghanistan and what was north-west India, David Grieg's Miniskirts of Kabul has an exciting premise somehow let down by its dream quality. A British woman – Jemima Rooper, who is surprisingly stronger as Afghan women than British ones – is interviewing former Afghan Communist President Najibullah (Ramon Tikaram), while he hides in an underground UN safehouse below Taliban shelling of Kabul in 1996. It is the day before the Taliban found him and tortured him to death. So, how is the woman there? She 'imagined' herself into his compound. She is later able to 'imagine' him a bottle of whisky, and produces – from her imagination – a TV showing the Spice Girls so that the so-called Ox of Kabul can boogie to his favourite music. Hit and miss.

Thankfully, The Great Game is absolutely more hit than miss, with some fine ensemble acting (especially from Rick Warden, Vincent Ebrahim, Ramon Tikaram and Jemima Rooper) and strong, balanced writing throughout. It's a shame there aren't any Afghan writers – in fact, they all seem to be at least partly British – as this blunts the feeling of authenticity when there are Afghans onstage. The depiction of the Twin Towers attack following a suicide bombing assassination is beautiful, and you don't often say that about September the 11th.

I think the Tricycle may have just became my favourite theatre.