BWW Reviews: DINNER WITH SADDAM, Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre, September 22 2015

As if things weren't bad enough with no food in the shops, neighbours digging wells for water and the American war machine about to be unleashed, Ahmed is also coping with a wife who won't stop complaining, a daughter who won't marry her cousin, and Saddam Hussein who has turned up for a spot of dinner. Yes - that Saddam Hussein, one of whose many eccentricities involved dropping in on random subjects in a kind of twisted version of Henry V's visits to his soldiers before Agincourt. Ahmed, having already had some trouble with Saddam's right-hand man, food taster and Torturer-in-Chief, doesn't cope well - but who would?

In the programme, writer Anthony Horowitz acknowledges the influences of Moliere, Joe Orton, Edward Bond and Michael Frayn and they're definitely bubbling under the surface of this farce - but I also saw quite a bit of Fawlty Towers too, with a hissed, "Don't mention the war" and the machinations of "The Kipper and the Corpse" never too far away. The comedy, though inevitably of darkest hue, gets rather broad at times and there's a few obvious plot devices that might grate for some, but the laughs are big and plentiful. It's another confirmation that, like panto, farce must be properly embraced if it is to succeed.

Sanjeev Bhaskar's Ahmed gets plenty of good lines (and a few that someone as smart as he is surely wouldn't say in such circumstances) but his main job is to provide the centre that does not hold under the clash of the forces of liberalism and repression. He gets excellent support from Shobu Kapoor as his long-suffering pragmatic wife, Samira, and from Rebecca Grant, whose 25-year-old Rana rails against her father's controlling conservatism, but who also understands more after Ahmed reveals just how boxed in he is by tradition, old promises and the one thing that binds his country together - the overwhelming need not to be tortured.

Most of the slapstick comes from the excellent Ilan Goodman, who doubles as Colonel Farouk and Rana's would-be lover Sayid, and from Nathan Amzi, who farts his way through the part of the appalling Jammal, Rana's would-be husband, doing well to squeeze some sympathy out of the audience for a terrifying example of how a state can corrupt every inch of a man (and how a sadist can be indulged.)

Lording it over these relatively ordinary people, sometimes quite literally, is 78-year-old Steven Berkoff, in daubed, if nevertheless authentic make-up, as the Baathist butcher himself. This Saddam is, of course, ruthlessly, arbitrarily brutal, but not without charisma nor wisdom, and, in a set-piece speech that does rather snag at the comedy, not without reason to rail at the capricious nature of The West who would arm him to the hilt before taking him down with cruel sanctions and then weapons that destoyed masses of men, women and children. The venue is small enough to catch Berkoff's sneers and raised eyebrows, on occasion making this another Berkoffian display, but also just right for a man who knew his days were numbered.

Horowitz wanted us to look again at the Iraq debacle, sensing the public's fatigue with its two decades and more of death and dreadful stagnation and chose comedy as his vehicle to do so. In following a long tradition of turning tyrants into turns, he succeeds, but I didn't learn anything new about the conflict - rather like the region's terrible wars, my thoughts were no nearer resolution after a couple of hours, for all the author's didactic intentions.

Dinner with Saddam continues at the Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre until 14 November.

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