BAGHDAD WEDDING
Soho Theatre + Writers' Centre, London W1
Opened 3 July, 2007
**
England's new no-smoking regulations provide an exemption "Where the
artistic integrity of a performance makes it appropriate". It is not
crucial to the plot here that one character smokes cigarettes and
another spliffs, but surely the author's inclusion of such acts is the
primary indicator of artistic integrity. Full marks, then, to director
Lisa Goldman for not letting red tape interfere with her theatrical
enterprise and daring to dissipate about one cig's worth of smoke in an
hour and three-quarters. Rather fewer marks, though, for her choice of
play. Hassan Abdulrazzak's playwriting debut excites mild curiosity
more often than dramatic compulsion.
In examining the effect of the Iraqi war on "ordinary people",
Abdulrazzak does not condescendingly depict struggling farmers or urban
proles, but rather the middle classes. We are shown the three central
characters in the late 1990s at Imperial College, London, and joking
that all Iraqis there are studying either medicine or engineering.
(Abdulrazzak himself is a molecular biologist there.) Jump forward to
2004 back in Baghdad, and one of them, Salim (Matt Rawle), is about to
get married, until a U.S. helicopter's rocket hits the wedding convoy.
So far, so-so; it is intriguing but little more to see the perspective
of such characters on Saddam, sanctions, invasion, Islamism etc.
My interest began to be aroused in earnest by Salim's account of his
experiences following the rocket attack. It seems as if this
westernised author of a controversial gay novel may be about to become,
not radicalised exactly, but awakened to the religious and political
complexities of the situation. Unfortunately, this possibility rapidly
subsides into an account of his suffering at the hands of the American
military. Whatever one's views of the atrocities perpetrated there, the
brutal fact is that it now takes something special to hold our
attention as a theatre audience, and this is nothing special. Goldman's
production is as efficient and detailed as ever, although it is a bad
decision to have the cast affect even mild Iraqi accents. In the end,
though, the play falls victim to audience war fatigue: in either news
coverage or artistic renderings, it takes something more egregious than
this to engage our hearts and minds. We shouldn't feel like this, but
we do.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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