Can you have a comedy about tyranny? Chaplin got away with in The Great Dictator. But Anthony Horowitz’s play faces two obvious problems. Given what we know about the tragic fate of Iraq, it is difficult to raise a smile about the embarrassments of Saddam Hussein dropping in for dinner. When a wildly farcical first half gives way to a sombre political message in the second, it is as if David Hare has suddenly taken over from Ray Cooney.
Horowitz has seized on the fact that Saddam did indeed descend on the homes of Baghdad citizens to avoid his enemies and show solidarity with his people. We see a deeply divided Sunni family, on the eve of invasion in March 2003, coping with the news that the leader is about to arrive. Husband and wife are at odds, their anti-Saddam daughter is in love with a Shia actor and the household is in chaos. But jokes about blocked toilets, water shortages and the confusion of rat poison and exotic spices that might seem funny in a western farce tend to stifle laughter when they occur in a city suffering from United Nations sanctions.
With the arrival of Saddam himself, the play takes a completely different turn. We are left in no doubt that Saddam, played with virtuosic menace by an almost unrecognisable, thickly moustached Steven Berkoff, is filled with the arbitrary cruelty of the despot. A security guard who unwisely yawns is taken out to be shot and, recalling the fate of his kith and kin, Saddam remarks on one who died a most unusual death: “It was completely natural.”
Saddam also becomes the vehicle for Horowitz’s genuine anger about the actions of western governments: we are reminded that the dictator would never have come to power without the CIA, that the Americans were supportive of Iraq’s war with Iran and that the British were gassing Kurds long before Saddam Hussein was born. All these charges may be just, but they mean the farcical action is suspended in order to give Saddam the floor.
A part of me admires Horowitz, a skilled TV writer and author of a new James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, for boldly using a popular form to make political points. But he never quite marries the two, and while I’m normally receptive to faecal and fart jokes, it’s difficult to laugh when they stem from a sewage crisis caused by an international ban on the importation of chlorine.
The play is clearly prompted by a sense of savage indignation, but our collective guilt takes the shine off the farcical gingerbread. Berkoff, mixing uncivil leers at his host’s daughter with the danger of a cobra who could strike at any moment, is always a pleasure to watch.
Lindsay Posner’s fast-moving production has good support, from Sanjeev Bhaskar as the harassed householder, Rebecca Grant as his mutinous daughter and Ilan Goodman as both a security boss and a Shia soap star. But, as Shakespeare said in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “To move wild laughter in the throat of death? It cannot be, it is impossible.”
• At Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 14 November. Buy tickets from theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906
