Game. Set. Match.: Dubai’s multicultural take on Perfect Strangers returns in October

Seven friends, a wedding at a tennis club resort and one bad idea over dinner: everyone puts their phone on the table, and every message and call is shared with the group. That’s the premise of Game. Set. Match., the Dubai stage adaptation of Perfect Strangers, which returns to The Junction on Alserkal Avenue from Friday 16 to Sunday 18 October. The first run, in September 2025, was the first production staged at the Playhouse Studio Theatre in the new Covent Garden at Mall of the Emirates, and the producers say every show sold out. The rematch moves to a 170-seat black box for three performances. That’s roughly 500 seats in total, so anyone who missed it last year shouldn’t leave booking too late. Paolo Genovese’s 2016 Italian comedy-drama is, as of January 2024, recognised by Guinness World Records as the most remade film, with 24 versions in different languages, including Arabic and Hindi. Each of those versions keeps its cast within a single culture. Game. Set. Match. doesn’t: one couple is Indian, one Arabic-speaking and one European. “It was very deliberate,” says Asad Raza Khan, co-producer and lead actor, and founder of Tall Tales Production. “We want to celebrate community, residents and everyone who calls Dubai home. All of us have friends and family from different cultures, and we wanted to make it relatable for everyone here.” Khan says Dubai, where so many nationalities live side by side, was the obvious place to try it. When the show launched last year, the producers framed it around the UAE’s Year of Community. Moving the characters across cultures meant more than recasting. Khan says the dialogue and the way the characters speak to one another were largely rewritten, while the story itself stayed intact. “Overall, we have kept the plot and pacing true to the original,” he says. For the re-run, writer Sid Abbas has reworked parts of the script and staging “just to make it fresher”, in Khan’s words. Meghana Dhawan directs, with Satya Baskaran of Cross Bronx Studio as co-director and producer. There’s also a change to the cast: Rasheed Hattab, an Emirati actor playing a Lebanese character, joins for the re-run, for example. The detail from last year’s run that stayed with Khan wasn’t the laughs. It was who laughed at what. He says audience members often recognised themselves in characters from a different background: Lebanese audience members saw themselves in the Indian or Pakistani characters, and vice versa. “It just shows that we, living in the UAE, share the same soul, even if we come from different backgrounds.”