The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes, Arcola Theatre

Rashid Razaq’s black comedy The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes has its world premiere performance at the Arcola Theatre this summer. Directed by the extraordinary director Nicolas Kent, this is a deftly told story of an Iraqi refugee trying to pass his UK citizenship test.

The Story...

Based on a short story by Hassam Blasim from his collection of stories about Iraq called The Madman of Freedom Square (Majnun Sahat al-hurriyya), the play begins: “In Iraq his name was Selim Abdel Hussein. He worked for the municipal garbage in Baghdad, in the special team in charge of cleaning up the debris from the sites of explosions. He died in the Netherlands in 2009, under a different name: Carlos Fuentes.” In London, he marries an older wealthy woman and tries to memorise the names of Henry VIII’s wives as part of the citizenship test but still somehow cannot find a firm foothold in his new life.

Rashid Razaq has found humour even in the darkest situation, illuminating the most ridiculous obstacles immigrants and refugees must try to overcome while at the same time portraying them with honesty and universality.

The People...

Originally a journalist, Razaq is proving to be a promising new voice in theatre. His play The President and the Pakistani, staged at the Waterloo East Theatre in 2012 was praised for its “thoughtful and thought-provoking” imagining of Barack Obama’s rise to power. T V and film actor, Nabil Elouahabi co-produces and stars in the production as Selim. An extremely talented British-Moroccan actor, he has appeared in blockbuster movies, Zero Dark Thirty and The Sum of All Fears and made his name as with recurring roles in Top Boy and Eastenders . Elouahabi is joined by Coronation Street actress Sara Bahadori , and Caroline Langrishe (daughter of the Baronet of Langrishe) plays Selim’s beneficent wife.

Nicolas Kent was the artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre for 27 years. He is known for the Tricycle Tribunal plays, which used radical verbatim techniques of transcribing real life dialogue to explore topics from the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry to Guantanamo Bay. He has tackled the subject of Iraq before too in the play Justifying War. As the Guardian’s Michael Billington puts it: “Kent and his team.... have taken subjects traditionally regarded as the province of the press or BBC’s Newsnight... and put them onstage.”