Nima Taleghani on Bacchae: 'You’re invited for a good time, not for homework'

“There’s no way around this, it’s quite a big deal.”

Nima Taleghani is sat in a room deep within the National Theatre, expressing a mixture of terror and bewilderment at the imminent arrival of Bacchae on stage, his first venture as a playwright, which will actually make him the first ever debut playwright to have a play performed in the hallowed Olivier theatre.

“I had the idea a few years ago and started cooking it in my bedroom, on a little fold down desk, because it was too small to have a proper desk. Now, I can’t believe how seriously this play has been taken. When I saw everyone in costume, I was like, ‘oh my God, you’ve done all this because of what I wrote?’ You’ve got all these supremely intelligent, talented people trying to make this thing… I’m like, ‘you don’t have to do this, you know...I was just joking!’”

Taleghani is the 32 year old actor from North London who you’ll know from Heartstopper – he’s Mr Farouk – and from the stage in productions like Jamie Lloyd’s Cyrano de Bergerac; he has spent the past year at the National working on his version of Euripides’ Greek tragedy. And now it is happening, and is being taken very seriously. In fact, it is going to be receiving even more attention since it is directed by Indhu Rubasingham and will be the first production as the new Director of the National. It couldn’t be more of a big deal actually.

“It was just an idea I had in my room,” he groans.

Nima Taleghani in rehearsals for Bacchae at the National Theatre (Marc Brenner)

Taleghani is one of those people who you can’t help but instantly love. He’s genuinely gobsmacked by what’s happening but also being very funny with all this “accidental” writer stuff. Despite his mortification around the situation, what he’s come up with is a wild and hilarious show full of violence, hilarity, and outrageous swearing, that rips apart all expectations of a theatre experiences, breaking the fourth wall with such commitment he discovers a fifth wall and breaks that too. He’s worked hard for this, particularly since he’s written the whole thing in verse.

The first inkling of it came when he was encouraged to adapt a classic and became drawn to Greek plays, for how “out there” they were, and how they were far enough removed to be able to brought into a new context. As an Iranian, he was drawn to one called The Persians, before then coming across The Bacchae, which seemed ripe for adaptation; the tale of Dionysus returning to Thebes and looking for acceptance from his cousin King Pentheus, while his female followers, the Bacchae, are looking for liberation. Beneath the noise of the show, the wrangling with contemporary issues around migrants, identity, prejudice and petty little dictators.

“You’ve got a half-man, half-God, who isn’t accepted in Greece because he’s from Asia,” he enthuses, “So he’s a god who’s a refugee. And what does that about societies’ propensity to Other? That was being written about 3000 years ago.

And then he’s followed by these women who want to be liberated in different ways. People do want to let loose but there’s these confines that we’re stuck in, socially and politically.

I thought this is really cool. It’s like EastEnders. Really a family drama but with all these other dimensions that feel exciting. It’s not a manifesto for what art should be or what politics should be, it’s just looking these extremes and watch them combust. I’m a London kid, it felt like I could relate to it.”

Indhu Rubasingham (Director) and Nima Taleghani (Playwright) in rehearsals for Bacchae at the National Theatre (Marc Brenner)

He said the writing of it was all instinctual, “I didn’t Google how to write a play, I just started doing it,” but that naivety was useful to him in not worrying about what he was supposed to do, and instead pursuing what he found interesting and what he thought other people would find interesting. Since he’s been under the tutelage of the National Theatre, he says it’s been, “fun to learn some fundamentals on the job.”

The most fun has been sculpting the play with the actors in rehearsals, where it all starts to come alive. “If you give James McArdle [who plays Pentheus in hilarious fashion] the word ‘absolute’, he’ll make it really funny, whereas on the page it might look stupid.” He says he has no qualms about changing his words if necessary: “That’s part of the thing that freaks me out. Like people try and honour what you’ve written, but I’m like, ‘we can just change that thing I wrote in my bedroom 4 years ago. It’s no big deal.’”

One the crucial aspects of Taleghani’s Bacchae is that this is not an exercise in academia: “You’re invited for a good time, not for homework.” What audiences can expect are elements of the old and new colliding, with trad barriers between audience and actors being broken – “we’re not pretending it’s not a play” – and an approach unashamedly aiming to bring in a younger audience, including those from underrepresented backgrounds. Taleghani does work with youngsters and feels the need to represent experiences which he would have appreciated when he was young. As a kid at a tough school he wasn’t exposed to the performing arts but he wrote little raps and stories, and found himself steered from trouble into Haringey Shed, an inclusive theatre company. His route was not that of the usual posh acting dynasties and the play very much represents an unconventional approach, making it quite some statement for the new National.

While Taleghani wants part of the attraction to be the fact the play is effectively rapped and has hip-hop music numbers as well as a gleefully brattish approach to lauded notions of theatre, he shrugs off any notions of trying to be cool, instead simply placing it in “a tradition of poetic drama all over the world… it’s another way of being really honest.

Also, the magic is that we are making this contract together with an audience, that we’re not making it real but we’re all going to believe in it. Part of the invitation is we’re doing this together.”

Sharon Small (Agave) and the company of Bacchae at the National Theatre (Marc Brenner)

He typically underplays the difficulties of writing in verse, and says the trick was to make sure he was delivering the drama with clarity and meaning, instead of becoming too fixated on clever moments of wordplay: “you want the rhyme to help with the rhythm to help the storytelling rather than impede it.”

Rubasingham was an instrumental collaborator, he says, with her “strong dramaturgical brain” and it has been remarkable for him to hand it over to rehearsals and see how it, “stops being 2D and becomes 3D… life is breathed into it.” At that point it stopped being theoretical and, “becomes a fun game. What’s best for clarity, what’s best for storytelling? What can we do to make thing come to life in ways that I could never have imagined?”

Still he says his primary concern for his own role in this was “don’t be rubbish. Quite sincerely, like, just don’t be rubbish. And maybe even be good in some moments.”

The play will undoubtedly be controversial in its fresh approach, but he says with some amusement that he takes comfort in the fact that he’s not acting in it, so it’s just his name on the play not his face, meaning, “I can walk down the street afterwards.”

Of course, the reality is this will be a huge hit, and it is also highly likely to be an important play too, important enough for him to be celebrated as he walked down the street should he, well, be wearing a name tag. In his research on the Greeks he found that, “for them theatre was the original forum for democracy. You’re supposed to show different points of view and feelings and emotions.”

Melanie-Joyce Bermudez (Serene) and Ellie-May Sheridan (Yunann) in Bacchae at the National Theatre (Marc Brenner)

In that way, theatre provides an in person experience which can’t exist at home on your own. It can hit harder. And this is going to be particularly crucial to his Bacchae.

“In the theatre, when you're all part of the same ecosystem in that moment, you feel like change can happen.

I remember when Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce were doing the Olympic opening ceremony, and saying they wanted the Olympic stadium in the village to later be used as a place where leaders from all over the world could come and resolve things. I don't think that's that's been the legacy of it. But in live performances you've got to be brave and honest enough about showing the true extremes of humanity and differences rather than the palatable ones.

Part of this play is like showing the things won't be so palatable but if you pretend they don't exist, then how can you empathise with them? Or Combat them if that's what you want to do? You can't just shout at people you disagree with.

I would like to present some different ideas. You might oppose them and they might be uncomfortable sometimes. There might be things people say and do that you like, and things you don’t. But that's humanity. And if this is what humanity is like, what are we going to do about it? That's the question rather than to say to people: stop being like that.”

Ah, so there we have it: Taleghani is not an accidental hero at all, but one who may just be the voice we need right now.

Bacchae is at the National Theatre until 1 Nov