ROMEO and Juliet in Baghdad is both a celebration of Iraq’s culture and an examination of the conflict and violence tearing communities apart, according to director Monadhil Daood.

Part of the Riverside Studio’s Shakespeare season, the play whisks the Bard’s star-crossed lovers 2,000 miles from Verona to the Iraqi capital.

Daood believes the tragedy speaks directly to modern-day Iraqi audiences and also has a lot to say about the country to outsiders.

“We are living in a time of conflict and violence between communities in Iraq,” he said. “The audience in Iraq will see their own reality in front of them on stage. It may shock them.

“We will show our Iraqi reality through modern and contemporary forms, music and singing; all the beautiful customs and traditions of our country. Our play is about how to love and hate and live and die. And we hope that if we die, we die of love.”

Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad was written entirely in colloquial Iraqi dialect and appears at the Riverside Studios from June 27 to 30, with English subtitles.

However, Daood was keen not to completely lose the poetry that is so central to Shakespeare.

“Tragedy and poetry find a meeting place in Shakespeare,” he said. “In Iraq, daily life is infused with poetry; children recite it in the playground and every household has its own poet. As for tragedy… it is one of the defining characteristics of the Iraqi people.

“In my own writing I try to avoid what is seen as ‘poetic’ language in Arabic in favour of a style which is spare, unadorned and driven by the action – inherently dramatic rather than ‘literary’.”

The Rest is Silence, an Iraqi adaptation of Hamlet, and Macbeth: Leila and Ben – A Bloody History, a Tunisian take on the Bard’s ‘Scottish play’, complete the Riverside Studio’s Shakespeare season, which is part of the London International Festival of Theatre.

The Rest is Silence, by dreamspeakthink, is described as a ‘cinematic and dreamlike deconstruction of Hamlet’, interweaving performance and film. It runs from June 12 to 23.

In Macbeth, by the French-Tunisian theatre group Artistes Producteurs Associes, deposed Tunisian dictator President Zine El Abadine Ben Ali and his wife Leila replace Shakespeare’s most villainous couple. It runs from July 4 to 7.

For tickets to all three shows, visit www.riversidestudios.co.uk or call the box office on 020 8237 1111.