411 Suez 1956

First  viewed  : 25  November  1979

This  was  a  massive  dramatisation  of  the  Suez  crisis  which  took  up  most  of  a  Sunday evening , 3  hours  and  10  minutes  in  total. I  watched  a  portion  of  it, surreptitiously  sniffing  at the  collar  of  my  shirt  for  a  last  lingering  trace  of  the  greasepaint  from  the  night  before.

The  play  was  written  by  Ian  Prince  Regent  Curteis  and  sought  to  present  the  events  of  1956 in   a   light  sympathetic  to  the  Prime  Minister  Anthony  Eden  whose  career  they  brought  to  a premature  end. Curteis  did  not  seek  to  produce  a  definitive  account  of  the  crisis  that  ended Britain's  pretensions  of  being  a  world  power  and  thought the  finished  product  was  more  of  a docudrama  than  he  intended.

I  only  had  a  very  vague  idea  of  what  happened  and  didn't  watch  enough  of  the  play  to  get the  full  picture  but  did  pick  up  some  useful  information  such  as  the  fact  that  Israel  was somehow  involved  in  the  conflict  and  that  it  distracted  the  world  from  the  contemporary events  in  Hungary  where  the  Soviet  Union  was  violently  suppressing  the  revolution  against the  policies  it  had  imposed.  

It's  quite  easy  to  see  how  this  led  Curteis  to  his  infamous  Falklands  Play  a  few  years  later.