THE Collector, which can be seen at The Courtyard on Wednesday, September 28, is a compelling tale of murder, evil and betrayal set in occupied Iraq, born out of writer Henry Naylor’s experiences of a visit to Bagram Airbase in 2003.

The Collector is set in Mazrat Prison, now under Allied command, and one of Saddam’s most notorious torture houses where more than 10,000 people died. Nassir is a pro-Western local working at the prison translating for the American interrogators who is about to marry his sweetheart Zoya. When he is recognised by Faisal, a new prisoner and psychotic supporter of the old regime, his life becomes a living hell.

Henry Naylor is a writer who's better know as a political satirist and writer for shows such as Spitting Image, Headcases and Dead Ringers, and The Collector is the first of three plays he's written about conflicts in the Middle East.

"It all started when I was researching a programme I was doing for the BBC in 2001. I was writing for a radio show about the same time the war was on in Afghanistan. Obviously it’s hard to make that subject funny so I was watching the media intensely for any angles that I could use to write jokes. I was watching every news report and it dawned on me that they never showed any dead bodies. I looked into it and found that the BBC had this taste and decency policy not to show any of the victims of the war. I felt that it was disregarding the horrors of the war. It felt very immoral, like they were sanitizing the truth.

This idea that journalists have to sanitize the truth for public consumption gave me the idea for a comedy play called Finding Bin Laden. While I was working on that, there was this extraordinary incident on TV that involved a BBC journalist called William Reid who was reporting from Kabul, saying “the forces are getting close. I don’t know if you can hear outside but there’re a lot of explosions going off…and oh…that was really quite close”. Then – live on air - he was blown off his feet. Already it was the most confronting thing I’d ever seen on television. Then what happened was my old flat mate ran in front of the camera yelling “Jesus Christ”. I was completely bewildered. It turned out my old flat mate, who I’d lost touch with, had become a cameraman for the BBC and he was out there reporting on the war.

"I got in touch with him after the invasion ended and told him about what I was writing. I said that I wanted to get my facts straight and get past the media’s representation of events. So he helped me organize things and I went out and spent 10 days in Afghanistan. It completely changed my life. Actually living in a news event first hand transformed my writing. From that moment I’ve been obsessed with the conflict in the Middle East. It’s become the thing that I write about and it’s changed how I write. I still try to make things entertaining, but without trivializing it. I want to tell people what’s going on."

The Collector is directed by Michael Cabot, founder of the London Classic Theatre Company, who had directed Henry as a student. "Years later he came to see The Collector in Edinburgh. I asked him what he thought of it and he offered up a few ideas about how things could have been different: things I hadn’t thought about at all. So I asked him if he’d direct it if we staged it in London. He agreed and we sold out the entire run at the Arcola. He’s such an experienced theatre director, magnificent really, so I handed it over to him."

The Collector will be in The Courtyard’s Studio Theatre on Wednesday, September 28 at 7.30pm. To book, call the box office on 01432 340555 or visit courtyard.org.uk