A silly play masquerading as a serious one

Dinner With Saddam

Menier Chocolate Factory, SE1

What would you do if Saddam Hussein popped up out of the blue at your Baghdad house and demanded to have dinner with you? Lose your head and behave in an entirely irrational fashion?

Foyle’s War creator and Bond author Anthony Horowitz, who has set his new play in just such a Baghdad household on the eve of the 2003 American bombardment, seems to think this a plausible response. Yet the problem with his honourably intentioned comedy is that almost nothing beyond its premise (Hussein would indeed turn up at private houses for dinner to evade assassins) has much bearing with reality.

Of course, it takes guts to spin a farce from Iraq’s miserable recent history. Indeed, farce is a plausible metaphor for what life must have felt like for thousands of Iraqis living alongside the mad, murderous whims of their dictator. Horowitz’s Alawai family, consisting of The Kumars at

No 42 actor Sanjeev Bhaskar as an irritable patriarch, his spirited wife Samira and student daughter Rana (set on marrying her actor boyfriend rather than the sociopathic cousin her father has lined up for her), certainly tread a nice line in gallows humour as they bicker about food shortages, local corruption and the fearsome reputation of Saddam’s secret police.

But Horowitz, so excellent at orchestrating novels, is ham-fisted at plotting comedy. As Saddam (an underwhelming Steven Berkoff) and his guards pitch up in the aghast Alawai family’s living room, a wealth of crudely signposted plot devices pile up, including a spice jar full of rat poison, a misplaced revolutionary manifesto and a turd in the fridge – the play overflows with lavatorial humour.

More problematic is the clumsy way Horowitz uses comedy to score political points. Horowitz ticks off “issues” as though going through a check list, be it the patriarchal culture of Iraqi society or the sectarian complexities of its tribal history. In the more politically forceful second half, it is western culpability that comes under attack, from the disastrous impact of sanctions on Iraqi civilians to the role of the CIA in bringing Saddam to power in the first place. These are important, but hardly new, arguments that are almost impossible to attend to in the way they deserve when delivered in a hectoring speech from the mouth of a sadistic dictator.

Horowitz is a dab hand at comic dialogue, and Lindsay Posner’s well-acted production zings with snappy one-liners. Nonetheless, this is a silly play masquerading as a serious one.