'He has manic, nervous energy while Barry is the stable, secure, sensible guy. 'Sal is a cokehead', says Razaq, who admits he has never spoken to the person on whom the character is based. In the play, Siddiqi has been renamed Salim 'Sal' Maqbool in Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, he was recreated as a composite character named Sadik, mentioned in only a few pages. 'They had an odd-couple relationship,' says Razaq, a reporter for the London Evening Standard, showing me a picture of the pair sprawled on a mustard yellow sofa, a leather-jacketed and polo-sweatered Obama kicking back with an impressively moustached, skinny Pakistani. Provocatively titled The President and the Pakistani, it revisits Harlem, 1981, when 'Barry' Obama was living with his alleged party-loving, drug-abusing, illegal alien Pakistani friend, Sohale Siddiqi.

It is against this backdrop that new playwright Rashid Razaq is staging his debut production, based on Obama's college days at Columbia, New York.