BAGHDAD — The storyline is of hapless ordinary citizens having to pay endless bribes to a kleptocracy, while courtesans use high official connections to enjoy the good life. The inhabitants of this crumbling society are finally wiped away in a nuclear attack.
No Need to Tell Me, I’ve Seen It for Myself is the hottest show in town, and — given that the town is Baghdad — it’s a surprisingly bold satire. Against a backdrop of suffering caused by United Nations sanctions, fatalism over a coming war and the state muzzling of political dissent, the Iraqi capital has seen an unprecedented spread of the arts, and the use of it, albeit carefully, to question the system.
The theatergoers who pack into the hot and stuffy Nasr playhouse, with its peeling walls and plumes of acrid cigarette smoke, appear to range across classes, including government officials, and include a significant number of women.
The stars are two actors well-known from Iraqi television, Abdel Rahman El-Murshedi and Mais Qamar. At one level the production is a piece of slapstick with lots of gags about mothers-in-law, landladies, tarts, drunks and farting, with a dwarf as a jester. But there are also digs at the endemic incompetence and corruption affecting life under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
No Need to Tell Me, I’ve Seen It for Myself is the hottest show in town, and — given that the town is Baghdad — it’s a surprisingly bold satire. Against a backdrop of suffering caused by United Nations sanctions, fatalism over a coming war and the state muzzling of political dissent, the Iraqi capital has seen an unprecedented spread of the arts, and the use of it, albeit carefully, to question the system.
The theatergoers who pack into the hot and stuffy Nasr playhouse, with its peeling walls and plumes of acrid cigarette smoke, appear to range across classes, including government officials, and include a significant number of women.
The stars are two actors well-known from Iraqi television, Abdel Rahman El-Murshedi and Mais Qamar. At one level the production is a piece of slapstick with lots of gags about mothers-in-law, landladies, tarts, drunks and farting, with a dwarf as a jester. But there are also digs at the endemic incompetence and corruption affecting life under Saddam Hussein’s regime.