Theatre review: Dinner with Saddam

Children's author Anthony Horowitz has a fondness for playing in other people's sandpits - he's written Sherlock Holmes novels and recently gave James Bond a sassy gay friend - and now he turns playwright. The subject is his enduring anger over Tony Blair and George W Bush's military action in Iraq, and he's attempted to confront it with shocking comedy - well, "shocking" is definitely a word you could use. Dinner with Saddam is an attempt at a farce based on the true fact that Saddam Hussein would sometimes appear unannounced at the home of one of his subjects; ostensibly to show solidarity with his people, though it didn't hurt that it meant the US army didn't know where he was so couldn't blow him up. In 2003 Ahmed (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and his wife Samira (Shobu Kapoor) are bickering over the lack of fresh food and water, the broken toilet and their daughter's impending marriage, when it's announced Saddam (Steven Berkoff) will be joining them for dinner.

Theatre review: Seminar

The publicity image for Seminar shows Roger Allam throwing sheets of papers into the air, leading some people I know to be disappointed when more cast were announced, as they'd been hoping for two hours of Allam throwing paper around. Personally I was glad - after all, he needs someone to chuck the paper at. Of course, the throwing is (mostly) metaphorical, as Theresa Rebeck's play is about the ambitions, pretensions and easily bruised egos of aspiring writers. Allam plays Leonard, at one time a respected novelist, but nowadays better known as a talented and influential editor of other people's work. As a nice little earner on the side he holds exclusive writing courses, tearing into the efforts of the most promising new writers who can afford him - or go into debt to get him. Martin (Bryan Dick,) Douglas (Oliver Hembrough,) Izzy (Rebecca Grant) and Kate (Charity Wakefield,) whose vast flat they meet in, are in for the 10-week course.