Kate Eifrig and Valeri Mudek in Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or ‘Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein’ or Ambivalence. Photo: Michal Daniel

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Tonight, critics arrive at North London’s Tricycle Theatre to view—for the first time in Britain—five one-act plays by the American dramatist Tony Kushner, collectively called Tiny Kushner. One of the playlets in the group, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, made the author paranoid to the point of a “kind of panic.” The group the play was about, he says, are “very vindictive people.”

He is talking about Republicans—or some of them. They were in power in 2003 when he wrote the piece in question, which features George W Bush’s wife Laura and three dead Iraqi children. In the play, Laura reads a passage from The Brothers Karamazov to the children, killed as a result of American bombing. It is not light on symbolism. But it is intended to implicate all of us, not just the Bush family.

“[The Nation newspaper] put it on the cover,” says Kushner, “with a title they made up—Laura Bush and Evil—which I was very upset about. I thought it would skew the reading of it. I did have this moment of panic—of ‘what if they read this and decided to go after me?’” This was paranoia, he conceded. “But you get scared. I remember I took my laptop somewhere, and I took all my journals to my house in the country. I sort of moved things around thinking ‘they could steal stuff’.”