Theatre review: Genesis Inc.

Marking the 40th anniversary of the first test tube baby, Hampstead Theatre stages Genesis Inc., Jemma Kennedy’s satire of the monetisation of reproduction. The tangled plot follows two couples whose experience of the titular IVF clinic throws them together in unexpected ways: Bridget (Laura Howard) is an ambitious financier who’s had her eggs frozen there in case she wants a baby in the future, and overhears that Harry Enfield’s intermittently South African Dr Marshall wants to float the company on the stock market; she decides to pitch to represent him. Meanwhile her best friend Miles (Arthur Darvill) is a gay, Jewish music teacher who’s just got a job in a Catholic boys’ school, and has gone partly back into the closet in the belief that it’ll help him keep his job. Bridget is bearding for him, but with the fertility clinic on her mind, she wonders if the time has come for her to have a baby, and whether instead of an anonymous sperm donor she should ask Miles.

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.