Guest Blog: Matthew Greenhough On BISMILLAH! AN ISIS TRAGICOMEDY

An ISIS holding cell in Northern Iraq doesn't immediately strike most people as the most obvious setting for a critically acclaimed, sell-out, award-winning (not-so-humblebrag) stage comedy, but I knew in writing Bismillah! An ISIS Tragicomedy that it had to be funny.

As a comedy writer, I've come to understand that humour can be a powerful tool for building empathy. And that is ultimately what the play's about - empathy. Even if the empathetic subtext is wrapped up in arguments about entrenched ideological discourse, and a few (if I do say so myself) world-class knob gags.

Far from being a difficult location in which to find humour, I quickly realised, comedically speaking, that it was perfect. The greatest comedies, from Beckett to Galton and Simpson (the fellas who wrote Steptoe and Son) have demonstrated that two people trapped at odds is a staple. And you don't get much more at odds than a British soldier and a British defector to the so-called Islamic State.

The next challenge was the characters - making them real and relatable. The soldier (Dean) wasn't difficult. He's a white bloke, working-class, disaffected and Northern... Well, snap. The Army's recruitment propaganda was literally designed to appeal people exactly like me.

So conjuring up the kind of dispossessed young man who yearns for a sense of purpose and brotherhood (the kind promised by the Army's ubiquitous 'Be the best' adverts on the telly) was hardly a stretch. And I made him a fan of Queen, because who doesn't love Queen.

'Danny' (a nickname given in reference to Danny Dyer) was a bit trickier, as I ain't, nor do I know, any Islamists. The right-wing press at the time was telling me daily that anyone who had ever so much as looked at a mosque wanted to blow up a hospital in the name of the Caliphate, but it turned out none of the Muslims I spoke to had any more of a hankering to go to join a death cult in Syria than I did.

So I researched, and in doing this discovered that despite what I was hearing, these defectors, predominantly young British Muslim men, were not born monsters, who popped out the womb with an AK47.

More often than not, they were normal lads who - through circumstances involving grooming, social alienation, and disenfranchisement (as well as an understandable, if not wholly misdirected sense of rage at Britain's foreign policy) - had been mutated into monsters.

The significant thing was recognising that, of course, these defectors weren't (to paraphrase Lady Gaga) born this way. This was the approach I needed for 'Danny' to reveal himself - he was Dean, but just Dean with a slightly different background, who had made different decisions.

It was a choice that seemed perfectly justifiable for the character when I discovered that IS recruitment propaganda was chillingly familiar. Do you feel, lost, alone, powerless and with nothing to live for? Well, we have the answers.

The play then wrote itself. Especially when I made 'Danny' Southern; the only rivalry that comes close to the ideological one between radical Islamism and Western Imperialism is the the cultural one between the North and South of England.

Bismillah! became a natural back and forth between these two lads. On the surface they're worlds apart, trying to be something they're not (in the tradition of many great comedic characters, from Basil Fawlty to Derek Trotter), but who come to understand that they're more similar than either would like to admit. Including realising that they both used to work in Weatherspoons...

Bismillah! An ISIS Tragicomedy at Pleasance London until 13 May

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