When we go to another country, what is it that makes it feel strange and what causes us to feel foreign? The food? The smells? For most, I suspect, it is language. Being unable to speak a language renders us literally speechless.
That idea is explored in the latest work from Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour. He is best known for White Rabbit Red Rabbit – a clever, subversive piece about the slipperiness of language and meaning that has been translated into over 20 different languages. Like all the playwright’s work, however, it has never been performed in his own language, Farsi, in the country of his birth, Iran.
Nassim employs playfulness, whimsy, and a punishment involving tomatoes to right that linguistic wrong, with the help of the audience and a different actor each night – Chris Thorpe at the performance I saw – who is seeing the script for the first time. Throughout, Soleimanpour keeps control of the words by turning the pages of the script, which is projected in its entirety on to a screen.
Using a new actor each night was crucial to his 2012 play White Rabbit Red Rabbit because the playwright was not allowed to leave Iran. Therefore, each new actor was lending his or her voice to help Soleimanpour tell his story.
Soleimanpour now lives in Germany and can travel freely, but re-using the device is no gimmick. The show – an unusually vivid celebration of theatre’s liveness – becomes a dialogue between playwright, actor and audience, in which everyone involved has to struggle to make themselves understood.
This is probably the only show you will ever see that is also a lesson in speaking Farsi. Although the real lesson is, of course, in speaking the universal language of humanity.
That makes it sound pat and sentimental. It’s not. This is a show that uses presence – technological and physical – and absence to clever effect. It explores the freedom and limitation of language, whether through censorship or the difficulties of speaking in one language and feeling in another. The act of staging this show is a striking demonstration of how words can keep us apart but also bring us together.
• At Traverse, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
