It was a long time before any anti-jihadist satire emerged from the smoke of 9/11 and when it first opened in 2005, Mark Ravenhill’s Product was still not it.

Ravenhill took the very British line that it is cleverer to laugh at ourselves.

Product is an hour-long pitch for a truly appalling film script which the producer – brilliantly and increasingly desperately played by Olivia Poulet – hopes will see a young starlet fall in love with a ‘dusky fellow’ she meets on an aeroplane and who, on closer inspection, turns out to be a terrorist.

Exuberantly Ravenhill, the script foresees a meeting between our-heroine-in-a suicide-vest, a lost child and Mickey Mouse.

It’s funny like the bathos of The Wrong Mans is funny (incompetents caught in violent crime) but it’s more than that because Mark Ravenhill speaks uncomfortable truths.

We guffaw at Hollywood’s need for a ‘dusky fellow’ and a redemptive love story, but when we’re asked to laugh at an image from Abu Ghraib (dusky fellow fitted with electrodes) it isn’t funny any more, it’s ferocious.

A decade later and still no Hollywood jihad action love story but we can never stop asking what might ever give them cause to make one.

FOUR STARS