Life lessons ... Sirine Saba (Luma) and Nitzan Sharron (Marwan) in Baghdad Wedding. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
I like plays that take me into new territory. The one that did that best in 2007 was Baghdad Wedding at London's Soho Theatre. The author, Hassan Abdulrazzak, is a molecular biologist at Imperial College. Using his experience as an Iraqi expat, he switched between London and Baghdad in the years from 1998 to 2005 to show us how human lives are shaped by political crisis.
In truth, our theatre has reacted swiftly to the Iraq war, but all the previous accounts I've seen have dealt with it from a western perspective. Abdulrazzak's was the first to approach it from an Iraqi angle. He depicted the passionate love of home amongst Iraq's London exiles, the horrific experiences of a female doctor on returning to Baghdad and the divided views of intellectuals about their country's future. The hero, a bisexual novelist and initial apologist for the invasion, argued that at least the war had put Iraq on the international map: a Baghdad journalist retorted that, as soon as the US pulls out, "we'll be instantly forgotten".
I learned a lot from the play. But Abdulrazzak also showed how, even in a time of crisis, people fall in and out of love and pursue individual career ambitions. It would have been a cracking play under any circumstances. Coming from a first-time dramatist, carrying out post-doctoral research, it was astonishing.
The only comparably startling play was Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs: a brilliant study of our fetishistic obsession with external beauty and our creation of a moral mayhem in which crucial organs are treated like detachable parts. If Abdulrazzak's play explored fresh territory, von Mayenburg's confirmed that we are already living in an ethical nightmare.
For my review of the year in theatre, click here.
