A sell-out Dubai stage comedy is getting a second run this October, and it's a good excuse to plan a culture-focused weekend in the city. Game. Set. Match., a stage adaptation of the Italian film Perfect Strangers, plays three nights at The Junction in Alserkal Avenue from Friday 16 to Sunday 18 October 2026.
The premise will be familiar to anyone who caught one of the many screen versions: seven friends at a wedding at a tennis club resort agree to place their phones face-up on the dinner table and share every incoming call and message with the group. Chaos, obviously, follows.
What makes this version different is the casting. Paolo Genovese's 2016 original holds a Guinness World Record as the most remade film ever, with 24 language versions as of January 2024 — but each keeps its cast within one culture. The Dubai production deliberately mixes things up: one couple is Indian, one Arabic-speaking, one European. Co-producer and lead actor Asad Raza Khan, founder of Tall Tales Production, says the goal was to reflect the city itself, where friends and families routinely span half a dozen nationalities.
The first run, staged in September 2025 at the Playhouse Studio Theatre in the new Covent Garden at Mall of the Emirates, sold every seat. The October return moves to The Junction's 170-seat black box, with roughly 500 tickets across three performances — so late bookers risk missing out. Writer Sid Abbas has reworked the script and staging for freshness, Meghana Dhawan directs alongside co-director Satya Baskaran of Cross Bronx Studio, and Emirati actor Rasheed Hattab joins the cast playing a Lebanese character.
One detail from last year's run stuck with the producers: audiences kept recognising themselves in characters from entirely different backgrounds. Lebanese theatregoers saw themselves in the Indian and Pakistani roles and vice versa, which Khan reads as proof that Dubai's residents, whatever their passports, share the same social anxieties — mostly about what's on their phones.
That anxiety is the show's engine, says German actor Jennifer Schmidt, who plays a European socialite. Every ringtone spike ratchets up the tension in the room, much like a group chat going wrong in real life. Performances run 120 minutes with a short interval, tickets start from Dhs105 via platinumlist.net, and the age guidance is 13-plus.
For travellers, this pairs neatly with Alserkal Avenue itself — Al Quoz's warehouse district of contemporary galleries, coffee roasters and indie food spots, well off the usual mall-and-marina circuit. Come for the play, stay for an afternoon wandering the galleries, and you'll have seen a side of Dubai most short-stay visitors never find.
