Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East.

Verbatim theatre has been the flavour of political theatre for the past two decades, and no theatre has done more to promote this style of public witnessing than the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London. Its artistic director, Nicolas Kent, has created a special style of verbatim drama called tribunal theatre, where the results of long-running public inquiries or trials are edited into an evening’s viewing. His latest venture, Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry, which opened last night, illustrates the pros and cons of this type of infotainment.

Route Irish isn’t the St Patrick's Day parade along Fifth Avenue in New York, but the “most dangerous road in the world”, from Baghdad airport to the relative safety of the heavily fortified Green Zone.

News junkies and connoisseurs of Iraq war conspiracies may be familiar with the true story of CIA agent Valerie Plame, which is earnestly converted to celluloid here by director Doug Liman. Part of Plame's work was infiltrating Saddam Hussein's weapons programme before the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was taken. Her husband Joe Wilson, a career diplomat who had served a stint in Niger, was sent back there by the State Department to investigate rumours of the sale of enriched uranium to Iraq for use in nuclear weapons.

A film apparently in support of British servicemen on BBC One? The Daily Mail will never believe this. Whatever, this was a bleak, unsparing investigation of the way veterans of our nation's various pointless and endless wars are dumped back into civilian life with scant regard for their mental health or physical wellbeing.

We’ve heard a lot about the American experience of Iraq: the internecine politicking in Green Zone, the deadly combat of The Hurt Locker, the tedium of camp life in Jarhead. In the cinematic reproduction of tumult in Iraq, one thing you never see a lot of is Iraqis.

Suzy, a private in the British army, has just returned from a tour of Iraq, back to the loving embrace of her close family in Middlesbrough. There are a couple of flies in the ointment, though; her nine-year-old daughter is distraught at her absence and refuses to speak to her, and her husband, Mark, a squaddie in the same regiment who has not been on the same tour, wants his loving embrace immediately and frequently.

He’s six feet under from the start. Paul Conroy is in a wooden coffin a dead-man’s distance beneath Iraqi soil when the flick of his Zippo illuminates him in the darkness where we’ve heard thudding and screaming. His oxygen, like the film, will last 90 minutes. A mobile phone connects him to his kidnapper, family and would-be rescuers. It’s the ultimate locked-room mystery, told from inside the room. But Buried is a curiously unclaustrophobic experience, instead opting to skip down sprightly, satirical tracks.

Tony Blair’s style of leadership was often mocked for being “presidential”, but last night it was Andrew Marr, in sober suit/ shocking orange tie combo, who gave off something of that self-assured “presidential” air. Standing outside No 10, Marr addressed the people in his smoothly measured, gently emphatic way.

JasperRees Not long now till Tony Blair faces interrogation by A Marr. GraemeAThomson and I tweeting a live review

GraemeAThomson Nice to see they’ve scheduled it straight after Restoration Roadshow. Someone at the Beeb with a GSOH?

GraemeAThomson Marr's gone with the orange tie. Provocative

JasperRees Are you prepared to speculate about the timing of the Hague twin-bed allegations? Who wins? Who loses?