Theatre review: Blue Mist

Mohamed-Zain Dada's tragicomic Blue Mist, going into its last week Upstairs at the Royal Court, is a story of young British Muslim men set in a shisha lounge – apparently there’s a lot more of these dotted around London than is immediately apparent, serving as an alternative place to socialise for people who don’t drink so don’t have much interest in pubs. It’s not a subculture I was particularly aware of, but then that’s kind of the point: As something that’s a part of Muslims’ lives but not particularly on the radar of most other people, it’s an easy target for right-wing figures who want to build up a narrative of dodgy underground networks breeding terrorists at worst, segregation at best. Hoping to become a documentary-maker, Jihad (Omar Bynon) sees this both as fertile material, and a chance to reclaim the narrative (as well as help save his beloved Chunkyz Shisha Lounge from being targeted and closed down.)

Theatre review: The Comeback

In between booking new shows that will almost certainly get cancelled or postponed by Lockdown Four, there's time to squeeze in a show postponed by Lockdown Three - I was due to see Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen's The Comeback in December last year, but it's returned to finish its run at the Noël Coward for a few weeks this month. Ashenden and Owen are the sketch comedy duo best known for The Pin on Radio 4, and they write and perform this show that's an attempt to mix that kind of sketch show with a farcical narrative: Although Morecambe and Wise didn't say "fuck" on stage quite as often that's definitely the comic tradition that's in The Pin's DNA, and similarly The Comeback has clear echoes of Hamish McColl and Sean Foley's Morecambe and Wise tribute The Play What I Wrote, which was a West End (and, improbably, Broadway) hit twenty years ago.

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.