Comedians to read all 2.6 million words of Chilcot report at Edinburgh Fringe Festival event

It took seven years to complete, over £10 million of taxpayers’ money yet a paperback version will set you back by £767: The Chilcot report. For those that don’t have the money to purchase their own copy, or the patience to read it, a collection of comedians, authors and politicians will be reading aloud all 12 volumes of the Iraq inquiry at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this Monday.

Iraq Out & Loud is set to take place in a garden shed at the festival. Among the voices to read the report non-stop for 24 hours will be comedian Omar Djalili, SNP MP Tommy Sheppard and crime writer Ian Rankin. It has been predicted it will take around two weeks to read all 6,000 pages – that’s over 360 hours’ worth of performance. The report is longer than War and Peace, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

When the Chilcot report was released in July this year it highlighted many of the issues people had been pointing out for years about the 2003 Iraq war and occupation – that the UK joined the US invasion before peaceful options were exhausted; that Blair inflated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime and that there was no post-invasion strategy.

Though the initial release of the inquiry sparked a whirlwind of media stories which speculated on Tony Blair’s fate, just a month later coverage of the subject has already died down, despite the fact that 250,000 Iraqis died in the war. Comedian Bob Slayer, who masterminded Iraq Out & Loud along with Djalili, told the Guardian that he hopes the performance at the Edinburgh festival will encourage people to engage with the report and question Tony Blair and his government’s actions in the Iraq War.

“This is one of the most important documents of our time…[i]f these mistakes are never going to happen again then it’s important that it’s not just a few people in Whitehall know what it says, but all of us, the public,” said Slayer.

The reading at the Edinburgh festival, which will be on South College Street, will be streamed live. Those who want to attend the show in person will pay £5, whilst others can take part in discussions about the report that take place in rooms nearby. Money is being raised for the project via the crowd funding website gofundme. Proceeds from the ticket sales will go to the International Rescue Committee which provides aid to refugees and victims of armed conflict across the world.

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