Each performance of this slippery metatheatrical experience features a different famous actor, unrehearsed and unprepared, interacting with the life story and the apparently live and recorded image of expat Iranian writer Nassim Soleimanpour.
Jodie Whittaker, Nick Mohammed and Emilia Clark are on the list: on opening night Adrian Lester was the guinea pig.
There’s novelty value and tenterhooks tension here. I hesitate to critique the poetic expression of the writer’s experience of oppression and displacement. Soleimanpour created his first play to travel when he couldn’t, and his “cold readings” have attracted star actors and international acclaim, particularly in New York.
Still, I wonder if the technique has any profound artistic value, or if it’s just a way to lure celebs into a one-night stand with an audience who want to watch them stumble and possibly fail. And while this particular show can be stimulating in its execution and heartening in its message of human togetherness it’s also, on a moment-by-moment level, rather boring.
Omar Elerian’s production features three video screens, a desk with a laptop and a Persian rug on stage. After a brief, awkward exchange between Lester and a pre-recorded voice, Soleimanpour appears on screen, showing us that the stage is a mock-up of his Berlin apartment, and introducing us to his wife Shiren and his dog Echo. The stilted and ostensibly real interactions quickly start to disintegrate.
The screen image shifts to Tehran, where Soleimanpour and his proxy Lester undergo a border interrogation. Later we’re in Sweden, where the author once had a snowmobile holiday with a descendent of August Strindberg.
For a long while we’re among the stars while Lester intones a speech about time, matter and human connection that sounds rehearsed but which is presumably (as he admits later passages are) fed to him through an earpiece. This, at least, is testament to the actor’s nimble expressiveness.
Soleimanpour paints a bittersweet picture of affectionate family life under Iran’s theocracy. He, Shiren and Echo left after the 2022 state murder of Mahsa Amini by the “morality police”. But he insists he’s “not a refugee” and can go back regularly. It’s not clear if we can trust this narrative, and the fate of his dissident father, his mother and his brother is uncertain.
His musings waver between profundity and bathos. Plays are a form of communion between the past, present and future. So are Persian rugs. So are friendship bracelets. Um, yes, okay.
This show’s title is an acronym of the defeatingly cryptic phrase Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen, but also named after Soleimanpour’s dog. Does that mean anything? Something? Nothing?
This is the final show of the 2024 London International Festival of Theatre, and it won’t do much to lift the biennial event back into relevance. This city is open and eager for new cultural stories and modes of expression, but they should stimulate rather than stultify.
