Shock and awe – and farce

Daniel Nelson

 

It’s got all the elements: one character pretending to be another in order to see his girlfriend, an incriminating document that’s rapidly and unknowingly passed from pocket to pocket, poison in an unmarked spice bottle, dates and a giant turd in identical plastic bags in the fridge, a blocked lavatory, overheard conversations, surprise visitors, extended fart jokes and terrible lines that should have been edited out at first reading (“They are searching your wife’s smalls”/ “Nothing about my wife is small”), a laughably ill-fitting suit, swapped identities.

 

As the mistaken identities, misplaced objects and misunderstood conversations piled up, I thought: All that’s missing is a man with his trousers round his feet. Then it happened, though the trousers didn’t fall down, and nor was the father (Sanjeev Bhaskar) caught in the act: he was simply changing from one pair to another, having learned that Saddam Hussein, on the move so that Western intelligence couldn’t get a fix on him, was about to drop in.

I don’t like farce and I felt myself going stony as the absurdities and the gurning grew, but I finally unclenched enough to be amused – partly because in the second half, when the dinner gets going (brought by Saddam because ordinary Iraqi homes were not well-stocked) , Horowitz lobs in a grenade.

Long interested in the invasion, the duplicities that prefaced it and the debacle that followed, but daunted by the apparent impossibility of saying anything new about dodgy dossiers and the lack of post-invasion preparedness, Horowitz wondered: “How can a writer make anyone angry any more?”

And then: “It occurred to me that comedy, even farce, might be the answer … I wrote a comedy because it was the only way I felt I could approach the subject. Otherwise, it just makes you want to cry.”

So Saddam, in the midst of the chaos swirling around him, is given a chance to make his case – restoration of national pride, provision of infrastructure and far more rights for women –  as well as the case against Western greed, duplicity, dishonesty and immorality.

Maybe Horowitz is right, even though neither the farce nor the politics seem quite strong enough to carry the enterprise. The arguments about the invasion and Saddam Hussein (and Horowitz doesn’t hold back on the dictator’s murderous record) are well-known, even if Lord Chilcot still hasn’t managed to deliver his report, a delay that fits only too well into the rest of the real-life farce. But it’s a mistake to think everyone knows about or is interested in the momentous events of 2003, which still affect international policies today. Those people won’t read Chilcot, if the report is finally delivered, but they might smile at Dining With Saddam, and ponder a little.

 

·         Dinner With Saddam is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, 53 Southwark Street, London SE1, until 14 November. Info: 7378 1713

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