Baghdad Wedding…

Life is full of surprises – and not all of them good.

Take one of my ex-girlfriends who, when we were still together, I spotted reading a book called Women Who Love Too Much. I thought she was reading this book because she was worried she’d fallen headlong into the emotional maelstrom that was our passionate relationship and she wanted advice on how to pull back. But it turned out she was shagging someone else so the book must obviously been a ‘how-to’ guide rather than a self-help book. My mistake. Bitch…

Also take my mate Shaggy who, when I was two chapters from the end of reading The Sacred Art Of Stealing by Christopher Brookmyre, took the book and stole it. Git…

But good surprises can happen, too, and Baghdad Wedding was one of those.

Myself and the Missus had journeyed to see this three weeks ago when it opened at Soho Theatre, but one of the cast pulled out so that night’s show was cancelled. So this weekend we ventured out to see its final Soho performance and it was stunning, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

The play focuses on a Iraqi writer whose wedding becomes a bloodbath when a US chopper bombs the wedding party. The bride dies and the writer is assumed dead so his friends carry on with their lives without him, until the writer returns (after a spell as the kidnap victim of a bunch of Iraqi terrorists then as the prisoner of the US Army as a suspected terrorist).

It’s an overtly political play but rather than get bogged down in the quagmire that is wartorn Iraq, the play sticks to a simple story of the writer and his relationship with his close friend and the women that both of them at various times are involved with. And because the personal relationships are so strongly written and well acted, it makes the political elements much more poignant.

It’s a beautifully crafted play and Hassan Abdulrazzak has a wonderful and poetic grasp of language and can switch from snappy comedy dialogue to truly brutal descriptive monologues at will. Lisa Goldman’s direction allows the play to move at pace without losing any of its emotion and the three lead cast members, Matt Rawle as writer Salim, Nitzan Sharron as his friend Marwan and Sirine Saba as Luma, the woman they both love, are excellent. Silas Carson as their friend Kathum was also good but there isn't a weak performance in the entire show.

An important and timely piece of work by a very gifted writer.