More Than Just A Mirage

The Desert of the Real is about love. It’s about war. It’s about the contrast between characters in Britain and Iraq. And it has been written by two Oxford oddballs, Max Seddon and Ben Judah, who make bizarre yet somehow productive playwrights.Seddon and Judah are a nightmare to interview. They spark ideas off each other, interrupt, backchat – this is an incredible conversation, but a meandering one, and difficult to transcribe. Seddon is heavily jetlagged, and Judah talks like he’s on speed: a million miles a minute.Their play, The Desert of the Real, unfolds as Oxford student Alice travels to Iraq leaving her boyfriend Nick behind. As Seddon explains, ‘She goes, and what’s going to happen to Nick when she’s gone? What happens when your girlfriend leaves you, for Iraq – for a place, for an idea? And then this Iraqi shows up and everything is completely swept out from under Nick, because this whole other world is intruding on him.’ The play contrasts Alice’s experiences in Iraq with Nick’s in Britain, adding a host of colourful characters in between.Between them, the two writers have a wealth of experience to draw on. Seddon’s play was in the Edinburgh festival this year, while Judah spent the summer bluffing his way through Middle Eastern war zones – he travelled through Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Judah is still buzzing from his trip, putting on accents, telling me anecdotes of being held up at gunpoint at checkpoints, filing stories as a war correspondent and nearly being taken hostage. Judah’s story makes for fascinating drama in itself; yet it is Seddon who grounded the Iraqi story in British reality and focused on an Oxford couple. ‘Max came up with the idea of “desert of the real,” which was this interrogation of different layers of reality: what was real in Britain, what was real in Iraq.’This is an ambitious project: it aims to cover a diverse range of experiences without being dogmatic. As Seddon says earnestly, ‘It’s not hammering an idea, we don’t have a big thing like “ooh, the Iraq war is bad”. So often political plays are weighed down by the message, and we are not either arrogant or stupid enough to do that. [The play] is about what a war and mixing of realities does to people.’Then Judah butts in: ‘It’s about how a couple feel about each other, it’s about how an Iraqi deals with his lost country, it’s about how these various characters that Alice meets in Iraq are living their life in this world where violence and identity are real.’And, importantly, it’s about love – but not love as you would imagine it. As Judah explains, ‘The characters in the play are all deeply in love with something; either in love with their lost homelands, or their idea of god, or they’re in love with each other, in the case of the Oxford couple.’ Did they base the romantic emotions on personal experience too, I ask? They squirm. Then Seddon pipes up: ‘I mostly made them up. I use little snippets that happen to me, or phrases that my friends have said.’ I am curious about this creative process, this double act of writing. Most of the writing takes place outside term time, Seddon tells me, and the pair meet to compare notes. So what is it like working together, I ask, hoping for gossip. They reassure me that they write well together, without too many disputes: ‘we both share the same goals and ideas,’ Judah tells me. ‘The original idea is that I wrote the scenes in Iraq, he wrote the scenes set in Oxford. Then we passed it around, rewrote each others’ dialogue…’So who wins the disputes about dialogue? ‘The play wins,’ they tell me earnestly. Yet I sense that Judah, as the wisecracker, fast-talker, is the more dominant of the two. ‘When Ben asked me if I smoke, I said no,’ Seddon says. ‘He said, “But you’re with Ben Judah, you must smoke! Here, have a pack!” Now it would be wrong to do this play without smoking.’How did they first meet? Seddon smiles. ‘We met properly in April, we were with the Cherwell drama editor of the time, and Ben smashed this guy’s sink with a wine bottle…’ I gasp, and look over at Ben for an explanation. He shrugs. ‘Eh…I was being Israeli.’ I raise my eyebrows, and hope that I will get out of this meeting and get to see the play alive, sink intact.By Elen Griffiths