As Iraq's insurgency was peaking, and American soldiers were dying at a dizzying rate from roadside bombs, a theater director in London was having an epiphany.

Plenty of plays about the Iraqi carnage were piling up on his desk, but there were none about the the calamities befalling Afghanistan.

It was then that Nicholas Kent, director of the tiny Tricycle Theatre - far from the glitz and glamour of London's fabled West End playhouses - decided to act.

"I became aware in 2007-2008 how it was all going wrong in Afghanistan," he said. "It wasn't being reported in the media and certainly there was no artistic response to it."

He commissioned a dozen writers to produce a dozen short plays on Afghan history. The result, "The Great Game," changed the Afghan debate in the United Kingdom at a stroke. FULL POST