The audience roll around laughing and clapping at the wordplay, including digs at the hierarchy of the ruling Ba’ath Party and fat-cat businessmen. There are loud cheers and deafening wolf whistles at the entrance of a peroxide blonde in a clinging black dress, with a plunging neckline and a scarlet feather boa.
A drunk reading her palm says: “I see something that goes off for six hours and comes on for three ...” The theatergoers, who endure Baghdad’s chronic power cuts, know what he is talking about, but the woman affects not to understand. “Ah,” says the drunk with a wink, “you just phone your friends and the lights come on.” Cue for uproarious laughter.
The “friends”, of course, are her lovers in officialdom. This is a double joke, as the actress is apparently known to be on intimate terms with more than one senior figure.
There are knowing nods from the audience amid the laughter as an old man delivers a comic monologue about Iraq’s stultifying red tape, and the struggle to get through dozens of official forms. As he speaks, he makes the well-known gesture with his thumb and forefinger for baksheesh.
It is not just the regime which is criticized. There is bitterness toward the West, blamed for imposing 12 years of cruel sanctions which have left the ordinary people of Iraq impoverished while the ruling elite is virtually untouched. The ending, in a nuclear winter, is a metaphor for the destruction Iraqis believe the US intends to visit upon them in its greed to grab the country’s oil.
A drunk reading her palm says: “I see something that goes off for six hours and comes on for three ...” The theatergoers, who endure Baghdad’s chronic power cuts, know what he is talking about, but the woman affects not to understand. “Ah,” says the drunk with a wink, “you just phone your friends and the lights come on.” Cue for uproarious laughter.
The “friends”, of course, are her lovers in officialdom. This is a double joke, as the actress is apparently known to be on intimate terms with more than one senior figure.
There are knowing nods from the audience amid the laughter as an old man delivers a comic monologue about Iraq’s stultifying red tape, and the struggle to get through dozens of official forms. As he speaks, he makes the well-known gesture with his thumb and forefinger for baksheesh.
It is not just the regime which is criticized. There is bitterness toward the West, blamed for imposing 12 years of cruel sanctions which have left the ordinary people of Iraq impoverished while the ruling elite is virtually untouched. The ending, in a nuclear winter, is a metaphor for the destruction Iraqis believe the US intends to visit upon them in its greed to grab the country’s oil.