Stuff will Happen

A certain US Vice-President's oath of office

I, Richard Bruce Cheney, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and safely discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.

would probably lose some of its gravitas if delivered in the style of Frankie Howerd.

David Hare's new play Stuff Happens opens this week at the National Theatre, and I was amused to see that Dick Cheney is played by Desmond Barrit, whom I last saw in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, playing the role of cunning, brazen, and faintly camp Pseudolous. addedentry's prediction that there would be an article or three of background on the new play in the Guardian/Observer was proved correct on Sunday by the substantial Theatre of War.

(For those interested in such US political minutiae, there is apparently no fixed form of words for the oath of office for the Vice-President: while that of the President is defined in article II, section 1 of the constitution, the words above I had to transcribe from a BBC recording of the 2001 Inauguration.)