Don’t you know that half the Amazon rainforest has already gone into writings about Iraq? The question put to the Iraqi doctor turned novelist at the centre of Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Baghdad Wedding hits its mark, not least for those of us who have reviewed play after play on the subject. But this is a piece of theatre that, while making some sadly familiar points, comes with its own distinctive voice and special authority.

That’s not just because the author is an Iraqi who lives in exile in London, works as a researcher in molecular biology at Imperial College, yet obviously remains close to his native country. It is because he gives stage-room to the most sophisticated of his countrymen, those who are more comfortable smoking pot in Islington than puffing at hookahs in Baghdad and know their Martin Amis rather better than their Koran. At times it’s as if the Patrick Marber of Closer were looking askance at post-Saddam Iraq.

Matt Rawle’s Salim is a London-based medico, a show-off bisexual who thinks of himself as a mix of Byron and Shelley, and the writer of a scandalous novel called Masturbating Angels. He’s in favour of the American invasion of Iraq, at least until the moment when, celebrating his wedding near Fallujah by banging off rifles in the traditional manner, his party is attacked by an American gunship, his bride killed and he is left for dead in a ditch.

This is a first play and not exactly perfect. The time-switches between 1998 and 2005 can be confusing. There are episodes, for instance a distracting one involving the American girlfriend Salim encountered at a Chomsky lecture, which could be trimmed. Though Lisa Goldman’s production fizzes with energy, there’s sometimes a lack of focus. And maybe it’s none too probable that Salim would be captured by insurgents, then rescued and treated as a terrorist by Americans. Yet Abdulrazzak writes sharp, witty dialogue, builds tension, holds the attention, and does much that one would expect of a seasoned dramatist.

He also has the intelligence, balance and inside knowledge to be trusted when he brings on stage insurgents – one a murderous thug, one a man with a serious grievance – and even when he introduces an American interrogator singularly lacking in humanity. You believe it when Salim ends up defying both his own personality and the advice of Nitzan Sharron, who is excellent as his best friend and the play’s narrator. He will join Sirine Saba’s Luma, another cool, Westernised doctor lately resident in London, in returning to work in Baghdad.

We’ve heard all about the agonies of Baghdad before: the danger of so much as sleeping on the roof or looking out of the window, the atrocities, the chaos of a nation that, as Luma says, has “been raped over and over”. But here’s a play that will make you see and feel it afresh.

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