A piece of the West plonked in the Middle East
The RSC’S latest play traces Gertrude Bell’s fraught attempt to set up a museum in Iraq.
‘Ioften wonder how the old Babylonians, with whom I now feel such a close connection, passed their summer,” wrote the archaeologist and adventurer Gertrude Bell in 1926, in a letter to her father. She was in Baghdad, back when the city’s soaring minarets were shaded by thousands of swaying date palms.
Then, in the throes of setting up a National Museum for Iraq – a country whose borders and constitution she had recently helped establish – Bell was fizzing with pride that, earlier that week, she had been able to show “some 15 or 20 ordinary Baghdadis” the priceless antiquities she had prevented colonial authorities and archaeologists from shipping to the British Museum.
Bell believed passionately that a museum containing Iraq’s most treasured objects would give the new nation state an identity. Now a play by the RSC tells the story of that fight and the fate of the museum that, 77 years later, was ransacked by looters in one of the greatest crimes ever committed against cultural heritage.
“The museum is the perfect metaphor for colonialism, because it’s a piece of the West, plonked in the Middle East,” says author Hannah Khalil, who has spent nine years working on the play. “It doesn’t quite belong there, and yet the fight to keep it and to make it work is important and real. The thing is, who is the museum for? Whose history is being preserved? And why does it matter when people are dying?”
A Museum in Baghdad is set in two time periods: 1926 and 2006. In 1926, we meet Bell labouring to set up the museum. The Englishwoman had been as instrumental as either Winston Churchill or TE Lawrence in drawing up Iraq’s boundaries following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. She became the newly crowned King Faisal’s closest adviser.
Unsurprisingly, her male colleagues were put out. One British diplomat called Bell a
“silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!”
Bell didn’t care. A skilled mountaineer and a former spy in wartime Cairo, she had already flouted every rule in the book for women of her day. “Oh, if we can pull this thing off; rope together the young hotheads and the Shia obscurantists. If we can make them work together and find their own salvation for themselves, what a fine thing it would be,” she said.
The Iraqis addressed her as “khatun”, which means “queen” or “respected lady”. She travelled to see the various sheikhs regularly, scorning the desert heat in a roster of fur stoles and heeled boots, an ivory cigarette holder dangling from her hand, guns and camera film hidden in her petticoats. She took her own bath and bed with her, along with couture gowns for the evening, a Wedgwood dinner service, silver candlesticks and crystal glasses.
“I went into this with a terribly preconceived view of her,” says Khalil. “A white Englishwoman travelling through the Middle East with her retinue; extremely privileged, a colonialist. I wanted to dislike her.”
Instead, Khalil found someone who “really knew the intricacies of how the tribal system worked. She spoke Arabic, Persian and Turkish. She listened to them … tried to do right by them. She wasn’t dabbling, she was in it for the long haul.”
Having photographed the digs at Palmyra, Syria, and worked alongside the archaeologist Leonard Woolley at the Mesopotamian city of Ur, Bell was an expert in Middle Eastern antiquities. “A nation needs to be able to look into the eyes of the past and understand where they come from, what legacy they carry in them,” her character says in the play. The museum was, though, her character admits, as “unwinnable a game” as making a country.
“She’s set herself this Sisyphean task of setting up the museum in the hope that it will finally give these very disparate groups of people, whose land has been endlessly occupied, and who have been forced into a westernised construct of a nation state, a common heritage,” says Emma Fielding, who portrays Bell in the play.
“At the same time, she’s ill, and she’s facing her mortality. It raises questions about legacy, about what you would pass on; what you might protect. What
She took her own bath and bed with her, along with couture gowns and a Wedgwood dinner service
you would die for.”
In 2006, meanwhile, the play depicts archaeologist Ghalia Hussein overseeing repairs to the museum after the 2003-11 Iraq conflict, during which the museum was looted in a two-day rampage that began the day after Baghdad fell to US troops. Almost 15,000 objects were stolen and smashed to powder, making it the biggest museum theft in history. The character of Ghalia (played by Rendah Heywood) was inspired by real-life museum director Lamia Al-gailani Werr. Before she died earlier this year, aged 80, she said the tragedy had left her not only grief-stricken, but furious at the way the occupation forces had stood by and let it happen.
Some of the looters had swept entire shelves into their sacks. Others were selective. Among the priceless treasures that went missing were nearly 5,000 cylinder seals (used in ancient times to print letters or images into clay), a gold and lapis bowl from the royal cemetery at Ur, along with the Lady of Warka, (C3100BC) and an 8th-century BC ivory lioness.
While 7,000 items – including the Lady of Warka, found at a nearby farm – have been recovered, more than 8,000 remain unaccounted for. A head of the Assyrian King Sargon II seized by US Homeland Security, along with spear blades and other Sumerian weaponry, was repatriated in 2015, the year a severely slimmed-down iteration of the museum reopened.
Fascinatingly, Bell foresaw the troubles that were brewing. She writes: “Can you persuade people to take your side when you’re not sure in the end you’ll be there to take theirs? We rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. Muddle through! Why yes, so we do – wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.”
A Museum in Baghdad brings into relief not just her considerable legacy, but her personality: unruly, eager, plain-spoken and possessed of a sprawling intellect that required feeding like a furnace.
“It came down to this great sense of duty that she had, I think,” says Khalil. “She’d made promises to people and she wasn’t going to walk away from them. Everyone told her she wouldn’t survive another summer – it was brutally hot – but she said: ‘No, I have to finish this museum, and when it’s ready I will hand it over.’”
Bell was found dead in her rooms in Baghdad in July 1926. Though she didn’t leave a note, it’s generally believed that her death was suicide, having taken an overdose of sleeping pills. “This is where I belong,” her character says, in the play. “It feels like time is running out... I’d like to sleep.”
“In the end, she realised that she was no longer in control of what was happening around her,” Khalil tells me. “The sense of knowing what could happen unravelled her. It consumed her.” A Museum in Baghdad, The Swan, Stratford upon Avon Oct 11-Jan 25, rsc.org.uk