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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Lisa Goldman.
Cast: Matt Rawle, Silas Carson, Nitzan Sharron, Emilio Doorgasingh, Cosh Omar, Sirinie Saba, Annie Hemingway, Daniel J Hart
Description: Humorous yet moving new play set during a wedding in Baghdad, which goes violently wrong, and in late 1990s London. A group of friends struggle with their identities, as the return from exile to an unrecognisable home. Written by Hassan Abdulrazzak.
Trains: Tube: Tottenham Court Road 
, Tube / Bus: 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 25, 38, 55, 73, 98, 176 
Phone: 0207478 0100
Website: www.sohotheatre.com
Extra info: Pub, Food
Two sides of a sexual triangle: Iraqis Marwan (Nitzan Sharron) and Luma (Sirine Saba)
Instead of resorting to rancid clichés about a fresh "battle for hearts and minds" of Muslims in Britain, the Prime Minister and his cabinet should take a brief course in political illumination. They should go to see Baghdad Wedding.
This first play by Hassan Abdulrazzack, an Iraqi biologist and post doctoral researcher at London University, proves quite devastating. It might even penetrate those shuttered, heavily guarded fortifications - Gordon's Brown's own heart and mind.
Indirectly Baghdad Wedding nudges you towards insight into the motives and depraved minds of the terrorists who tried to maim and murder hundreds in London last week.
Yet Abdulrazzack launches no direct attack on Britain for its role in Iraq or its continuing presence. His hero, Salim, a bisexual Iraqi doctor and novelist of gay love-affairs, even takes the Anglo-American line. When Salim, dynamically played by Matt Rawle as a homme fatal transformed by experience, returns to Iraq in 2004, he insists his countrymen should exploit Bush's eagerness to remove Saddam.
Abdulrazzack constructs a sex-triangle drama. He demonstrates how the private, emotional entanglements of three Iraqis - Salim, his best friend Marwan and Sirine Saba's far too stolid Luma, the woman both men have loved - are changed by war. The wedding of the title never happens: the car in which Salim and his wife-to-be are travelling takes a fatal direct hit when an American apache plane targets the motorcade.
Nitzan Sharron's love-lorn Marwan, narrator of sometimes awkward flash-backs and flash-forwards, then returns us to his and Salim's student-life, years earlier at Imperial College.
Abdulrazzack vividly conveys an impression of young, westernised Iraqis in London, succumbing to sexual freedoms their intellectual friends in Baghdad abhor. Salim's quasi magical reappearance, which misses a sense of joy in the writing and performance, imparts fresh animus to Lisa Goldman's generally powerful production.
Injured in the car-crash, captured by Iraqi insurgents, grabbed by Americans, questioned for weeks and beaten, Salim emerges after being given up for dead. He seethes with rage over his treatment and his bride's death.
He surrenders to fantasies of ghastly, violent revenge. The hopeless outrage that this Anglophilic Iraqi feels may well have an affinity with the fanaticism of last week's mind-sick terrorists who wished to bring home to Britain the suffering Iraqis endure, thanks, they believe, to the activities of Anglo- American troops. Hot theatre.
• Until 21 July. (0870 429 6883).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
It was very nice. I think that this project is very important for the Muslims.
- Gökhan Töret, London
I was at the press night last night- and thought the piece was extraordinary. "Catching" your heart- and making the audience use their head. New voices like this are very important- a West End transfer is a MUST.
- Sham Sandhu, London
