Stuff Happens

Product Information

Emma’s answer is mindful materialism which means being conscious of the global system behind stuff, appreciating the resources that are used to make it and accepting the responsibility of where our items will go once we are done with them. Gleeson soon realised that for many people overwhelmed by the prospect of decluttering, employing an impartial party was a big help.

Nicholas Farrell's Tony Blair is driven by political ambition and survival as much as by idealistic ideology. Farrell captures Blair's smile of insincerity, the earnest hand gestures and the sombre tone to his voice that Blair seems to have deliberately cultivated over the years in his efforts to convince us he is a man we can trust. The driving force of the play is in fact the articulation not of morality, but of power. (...) Power is the only pure ideal expressed in war, Hare seems to imply, and the only one fully examined in his play. I didn't expect to find this at the heart of Stuff Happens, but perhaps it isn't so much a political play as a play about politicians - an engrossing, dynamic presentation of the political process with all its frustrated intentions and unrealized ambitions." - Nicholas Hiley, Times Literary Supplement Enter no-nonsense Dubliner Emma Gleeson’s guide, Stuff Happens!. Like many of her peers, Gleeson, founder of the sustainable decluttering business Give Up Yer Auld Tings, offers plenty of practical advice on how to get an over-abundance of A, or a needless surplus of B, out of your house. But unlike many of her peers, she is also keen to get to the root, often ugly as it is, of just why we have so much stuff. In this documentary play, Hare appears to be painting a portrait of our leaders and saying, when you elect people like this "Stuff Happens". The funny thing about the book itself is it’s actually very cluttered. There was so much I needed to fit in,’ the Dublin author told me when I asked her about the focus of her new book. ‘I wanted to hammer home the seriousness of the environmental stuff while looking at the joy of our things and the real emotional weight our possessions can hold on us.’

Retailers:

Emma’s sustainability wake-up call came very early on in her career, when she moved to London during her 20s to study at the London College of Fashion and her Masters thesis looked at the psychology of over-consumption. Passionate about educating people on the benefits of buying less and buying better, she's an expert on sustainable consumerism and ethical fashion. Emma Gleeson, author of the decluttering guide Stuff Happens! Pic: Supplied

Stuff Happens is more an indictment than a play. (...) Most of the actors, however, cannot rise above the smugness and caricature in the writing." - Howard Kissel, New York Daily News At the Public, the play’s opening moments live up to its promise. One by one, excellent actors step into the roles of our leaders: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Colin Powell. (Gloria Reuben, with an unwavering coif and that indulgent little smile, becomes Condoleezza Rice.) Thanks to Daniel Sullivan’s apt staging—a kind of stadium layout, with the audience on either side of the actors—the show feels like a tribunal: Metaphorically, at least, we will hold our public figures to account.Yet beyond its inspired premise, and the crisp aplomb of Sullivan’s production, Stuff Happens is a catalogue of disappointments. Hare wanted to show how Bush decided to invade Iraq and why Blair chose to follow him. Except for a few last-minute addenda, that means the story stops three years ago, before Abu Ghraib, Plamegate, and the other calamities of the occupation. The play’s action has been, as they say, overtaken by events. The reason? For now, despite ample rhetoric on both sides, Tehran and Washington are trying to prevent an energy crisis on top of the diplomatic one. Finally a very strong point of society’s perception of the events is given by an Iraqi exile at the end of the book. The Iraqi even admits to hating Saddam Hussein by saying “I even longed for the fall of the dictator”, but the comment that Donald Rumsfeld totally changed his perception of things. He shows this by bringing up the way the Americans who died are counted and given an honorary ceremony but the Iraqi’s are unaccounted for. This shows how the war was totally unfair and that they considered the Iraqis not to be human. Getting started on the practicalities of a decluttering project should always mean starting small, says Gleeson.

Conniving president Bush is clearly the bad guy, while Tony Blair is given perhaps more credit than he is due (and certainly shown to repeatedly be the victim of Bush's weasely maneuvers). Except for the slightly sententious and uninteresting final speech by an Iraqi, Stuff Happens is a play, not a polemic. (...) I like the way Hare scarcely touches on the inner life of his characters - their marriages, their families, their private dreams and wounds. This is an austere play, about the austere choices of politics. It looks unsentimentally at what happens when stuff happens." - Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph Scene 24: This scene is the last scene in the play. It focuses on an Iraqi exile. The Iraqi generally states that the American dead are more honored than the dead of the Iraqis. The Iraqi also states that Iraq was crucified for Saddam Hussein's sins and that the people of Iraq are to blame because they didn't take charge of their own country, which allowed Saddam to take control of Iraq. [2] Production history [ edit ] Doing a book clearout? Titles which can definitely go include: out-of-date manuals and textbooks; bestselling novels or Man Booker winners from the early 2000s that you bought and never read, and know you’ll never read but keep out of some sort of intellectual guilt; out-of-date exercise and diet books. The focus of Hare's play is on what led to war, and far from the delusional mischaracterization of a situation and wishful thinking Rumsfeld offers here, Hare shows that the path to war the jr. Bush administration took was a coldly and carefully calculated one, 'facts' shaped and sold for a single purpose, truth an irrelevancy.In fact, Hare succeeds where many political pundits have blundered because he resists the temptation of the big idea. This war, as he presents it, is not about oil, faulty intelligence, geo-politics, or any combination of such factors, so much as it is about moral fallibility—most of all it is about our willingness to believe whatever suits us best. Let me emphasize “trying” and “for now” here. As oil trading throughout this geopolitical crisis continues, one should remember former UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s warning: “Events, dear boy, events.” Unwilling to admit to practically any of the many mistakes that were (and contiue to be) made, a complete absence of accountability still accepted by the American people, lessons have evidently not yet been learnt -- but Stuff Happens (and similar re-examinations of events) are a necessary and useful first step. People are really going through some stuff a lot of the time. You need a while to recover from each person’s story.”

Stuff Happens had its world premiere at the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre in London on 1 September 2004 [2] and has subsequently been performed at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum (with Keith Carradine and Julian Sands) in June 2005 and at Sydney's Seymour Centre (with Rhys Muldoon and Greg Stone) in July 2005. Greg Stone won a Helpmann Award for Best Male Actor in a Play in 2006. Getting these small but niggly jobs done “makes such a difference”, notes Gleeson. “You’re not in a constant battle in your home. When you need the Sellotape, you know where it is. Your quality of life goes up.” Stuff Happens is a play by David Hare, written in response to the Iraq war during the Bush administration. It talks about the events that led to the war on Iraq in 2003, which ps from George Bush’s election in 2000 up till his stepping down from office in 2008. The title is inspired by Donald Rumsfeld’s response to journalists about the looting happening in Baghdad where he replied “Stuff Happens”. The writer already states in the authors note that it is “knowingly true” but he had to use his imagination in parts that were not covered especially when the politicians were behind closed doors.Ned's worst fears are confirmed when he ends up in the class with the worst teacher in the school, possibly the world, and away from his best mates. Things don't improve when the teacher seems to have adored both Ned's older siblings – how is he going to survive the day, let alone the whole year? For now, the playwright has done well for giving the public persona of Dubya an added and unforeseen dimension, even if Stuff Happens remains too hidebound by recent history to make the imaginative leap into art." - The Economist We don’t know if or when this production is coming to the West End but sign up to be the first to hear! Running Time Bush’s reluctance to enter into debate gives him strength. This man is definitely not Cheney’s puppet. But his taciturnity is also the cause of disaster. David Hare's Stuff Happens has already become a chewed-over public event. But, after attending its Olivier press night, it also strikes me as a very good, totally compelling play: one that may not contain a vast amount of new information but that traces the origins of the Iraq war, puts it in perspective and at the same time astutely analyses the American body politic. (...) Hare avoids the trap of agitprop by cannily subverting the play's anti-war bias. (...) One comes out enriched and better informed." - Michael Billington, The Guardian