Baghdad Wedding, Soho Theatre, London

With breathtaking bad taste, the English National Opera has just revived Kismet, a 1950s Broadway musical in which Baghdad, "symbol of happiness on earth", features as the cod site for a crass Arabian Nights-style romp. Soho Theatre's Baghdad Wedding comes as the perfect antidote to ENO's cultural insensitivity.

Not that there is anything po-faced or pious about this blackly funny and irreverent first play by Hassan Abdulrazzak, an Iraqi biologist and post-doctoral researcher at Imperial College London. Where the piece feels well timed and salutary is in its focus.

Theatre has tackled the invasion of Iraq from many angles; this is the first time, though, that a play has concentrated on the impact of the war on sophisticated middle-class Iraqis – Westernised medics, journalists and writers who have developed a taste for Johnnie Walker and spliffs while training in England and who are more comfortable citing Martin Amis than they are The Koran.

Portrayed with an appealingly louche verve by Matt Rawle, Abdulrazzak's protagonist is Salim, a bisexual London-based Iraqi doctor who has published a scandalous novel entitled Masturbating Angels, about an interracial gay love-affair. At the start of the play, set in Baghdad at the end of 2004, this seductive scapegrace has returned from exile and is about to embark on married life. The eponymous nuptials are, however, nipped in the bud. Misinterpreting the jubilant rifle shots that are a traditional feature of Iraqi weddings, an American Apache plane drops a missile on the motorcade. That would seem to be the end of our hero, but the piece has surprises up its sleeve.

With Salim's brooding best mate, Marwan (the excellent Nitzan Sharron), as our narrator-guide, Baghdad Wedding indulges in complicated, potentially confusing time-shifts that always make lucid, dramatic sense in Lisa Goldman's vibrant, well-judged production. From the mourning for Salim's apparent death in Baghdad, the play keeps switching back to the Iraqi exile community in London in 1998 during Clinton's diversionary Operation Desert Fox.

We see a hurtful love triangle forming between the two friends and the beautiful, unconventional Luma (Sirine Saba), a trainee doctor whom misfortune summons home and into a disastrous marriage. Salim becomes an impish, active presence in Marwan's memories of him. "I know, but I'm dead now... I can say whatever I like," he retorts when his straight friend objects to a mischievous suggestion that they'd had sexual relations.

The piece charts Salim's moral awakening and, to maximise our sense of his progression, Abdulrazzak arguably strains credulity in the depiction both of his initial irresponsibility and of the misadventures that politicise him in the aftermath of the wrecked wedding. It's one thing to believe that he would have supported the Anglo-American invasion as a pragmatic means of getting rid of an evil dictator; quite another to credit that he would downplay the atrocities of Abu Ghraib on the grounds that "worse things happened at that prison under Saddam".

Similarly, to be captured by insurgents might be considered tragic; to be then rescued and brutally interrogated as a terrorist by the Americans begins to look like a schematic convenience.

What impresses are the play's fresh, vivid insights into the difficulties and contradictions of life during the war for Iraqis. There's an exquisitely tender, touching and humorous scene where Marwan meets Luma after six years' separation and tacitly berates her for wearing a hijab. She aches with nostalgia for the old sexual freedom of London, but betraying sartorial principles is the last thing that is now on the mind of a doctor desperately improvising in a hospital where "you virtually have an orgasm every time you hear the whirl of electricity".

An author such as Salim, uncertain whether he's an insider, an outsider or both, may resent the obligation to bear witness to his country's suffering and deliberately choose to write about homoerotic passion instead. For one of his journalist chums, though, the fear is that when the Americans pull out, Iraq will be instantly forgotten. Abdulrazzak identifies these tensions in a highly arresting debut.

To 21 July (0870 429 6883)