GrouchoSaddam oustayshiswelcome
Menier Chocolate Factory
HOW IS a playwright to tackle the most serious foreign policy calamity since the Second World War? An exhaustively researched Chilcot-like analysis? One of those seriousminded if dramatically dry verbatim plays? Or how about a knockabout farce set in a Baghdad house with jokes about poo and breaking wind?
This rare foray into theatre by prolific author Anthony Horowitz firmly belongs to the final category, which on paper at least would certainly be my preferred option.
Set in a Baghdad suburb in 2003 just before the shock and awe campaign launched by Bush and Blair, Horowitz imagines what it must have been like to be an ordinary Iraqi family who receives an unexpected visit from Saddam Hussein. Apparently, dropping in uninvited for dinner and a kip was the dictator’s way of keeping one step ahead of President Bush’s spy satellites. Here, the role of the most notorious dictator of recent times — a title for which there is strong competition — has tempted Steven Berkoff back to the stage. Meanwhile Sanjeev Bhaskar is Ahmed, the hapless head of the Alawai family who counts himself a loyal supporter of the tyrant until he accidentally kills his head of security, played by Ilan Goodman who doubles as the disguised lover of Ahmed’s daughter.
As is the way with farce, much of the first act is spent establishing foundations that later crumble, hopefully to hilarious effect. Yet just where the evening needs to take off, for the pace to quicken and the tension to rise, we instead get a seemingly unending diatribe from Berkoff’s Saddam about Western complicity during his rise, and hypocrisy over his fall.
It’s not an uninteresting speech and Berkoff, sporting a ’tache and eyebrows that Groucho Marx would have rejected for being too unrealistic, certainly captures the gangster in Saddam. But Lindsay Posner’s production never recovers from the loss of momentum. And even though the gags return, much like the Alawai family, by then we have had enough of dinner with Saddam.