It’s always agreeable to welcome a new venue to the London theatre scene and the Yard, created from a disused warehouse in Hackney Wick, has certainly established itself impressively over the last year.
Yet even the lure of a cosy bar, themed cuisine and £9 tickets cannot offset the disappointment that is Qudz, a baggy and unfocused look at life in Iraq under the brutal regime of Saddam and then the chaos and lawlessness of the American intervention.
Mazen (Moncef Mansur) is a sort of Iraqi soldier Everyman, sent first by the Iraqi Army and then the Americans on a top-secret mission down the Tigris to track a shadowy cleric named Qudz.
Mazen remains a frustratingly unknowable central figure, talked at rather than talking himself, and it all becomes so fragmentary that it’s hard to care very much one way or the other whether he and his crew surmount the bitter irony of chronic petrol shortages in this oil-rich land. First-hand accounts from Iraqis that form the basis of the research for this piece have not been used efficaciously enough.
Some desperately poor projection from the acting company doesn’t help and greater rigour in the writing would surely have been the result if Tarek Iskander had allowed someone else to direct - and thus re-point - his script.
Until Nov 3 (theyardtheatre.co.uk)
