Great war drama needs more than new cliches

On the face of it, the life of Rudyard Kipling's son makes a pleasingly simple morality tale. Kipling schooled him to fight for king and country. When Jack went missing in action in 1915, he was overwhelmed by guilt. Still waiting for confirmation of death he wrote: "Have you news of my boy Jack?"/Not this tide./"When d'you think that he'll come back?"/Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

In 1919, when the war was over, he said of the slaughtered young that, "If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied". So there you are: the poet of empire transformed into as steadfast an opponent of war as today's artists. It "will certainly resonate with people serving in Iraq or Afghanistan," said Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Jack.

Radcliffe doesn't seem to know that Kipling's reactions didn't always resonate with polite modern sentiments. As well as blaming the old for sending the young to die, he learned to loathe Germans. In 1915, he wrote Mary Postgate, a short story about a respectable spinster who finds a wounded, pleading German airman lying in her garden and leaves him to suffer. When he dies, she has an orgasmic "rapture" and "shivers from head to foot".

Critics have been revolted ever since. Angus Wilson called Mary Postgate " evil". Christopher Hitchens said it was "a paean of hatred and cruelty". Yet to show that Kipling and millions of others were caught between crushing remorse and inhuman fury would not only have been true, but more dramatic.

In the age of George W Bush, however, television and theatre are the last places to find true drama. You only have to see Sir David Hare's name on a billboard to know exactly what the political message will be; you only have to hear that Channel 4 has commissioned a play about suicide bombers to know they will be frustrated Liberal Democrats rather than fascistic followers of a death cult.

In the past, most good political writers have come from the Leftish middle class. The trouble today is not that their successors reach identical liberal conclusions, but that they are not good enough to do the hard work needed to get there.

The first task of dramatists is to put themselves into the minds of others and show conflicting points of view - and they can't manage it with arguments about war. Challenges to orthodoxy are so unimaginable that they can't bring them to the stage.

It's their loss, as well as ours. Without conflict, modern drama is worse propaganda than anything Kipling wrote, and vanishes from audiences' minds faster than the latest Downing Street spin.