Dinner with Saddam

Given that I have spent the entire week cackling at allegations that our prime minister may have enjoyed improper porcine relations, I’ll admit that having a sense of humour failure over Anthony Horowitz’s scatological farce ‘Dinner with Saddam’ is probably quite hypocritical.

Nonetheless: I found this comedy set in Iraq on the cusp of the Iraq War about as funny as I found the actual Iraq War.

It is Baghdad, the night before the start of the Allied bombing, and regular middle aged couple Ahmed (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and Samira (Shobu Kapoor) are bickering away as they get prepare to receive their slobbish prospective son-in-law  for dinner. The water is out and a plumber comes to fix it – except uh oh! Sayid (Ilan Goodman) isn’t a plumber, he’s their daughter Rana’s true love, masquerading as a plumber. Into all this fun, several jokes for later are laboriously set up: Samira has bought some rat poison, but it’s stored in a plain spice jar; for reasons that aren’t worth getting into, a turd is put into the fridge in a plastic bag.

Then Saddam Hussein (Steven Berkoff, looking weirdly like George Galloway) invites himself in for dinner.

I’m not entirely sure where to start with Lindsay Posner’s production. Maybe its racial iffiness, whereby a mostly white and Asian cast all adopt cartoonish Middle Eastern accents. Maybe Berkoff’s Saddam, a sort of bloodthirsty loon who occasionally breaks off to spout pious exposition about the good things he did for his people, or to remind us of the extent to which he was a creature of Western creation.  Or maybe it’s Horowitz’s timid refusal to actually push this further – there is almost no foreshadowing of the unimaginable suffering to come.

Truthfully told, ‘Dinner with Saddam’ feels more misguided than offensive and I’d let if off the hook I’d found it funny – which many people in the audience clearly did. But for whatever reason poo and fart jokes tends to bring out my inner Mary Whitehouse, and ‘Dinner with Saddam’ is about 95 percent poo and fart gags. The Iraq War was a cataclysmic event that reshaped the world, and its repercussions are still being felt today. All Horowitz really has to offer by way of insight into all this is the spectacle of a man shitting his pants.