What timing. Javaad Alipoor’s new show, which he writes, directs and performs, has a triple charge. It is political, metaphysical and personal. Over the past few years, his plays The Believers Are But Brothers and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran have brought WhatsApp and Instagram on stage. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, his proclaimed task is to investigate the real-life unsolved murder of musician and showman Fereydoun Farrokhzad, who, forced to leave Iran after the 1979 revolution, was found stabbed to death 13 years later in a flat in Bonn. Yet Alipoor’s subject is also the investigation itself: the way the resources and technology we use determine what we find; the way they shape how we think about ourselves as well as the world.
His high-voltage stage presence grounds and gives immediacy to a show that is by turns explosive, bewildering and revealing; at times it is so abstruse that you begin to think Donald Rumsfeld had a point when he talked about “unknown unknowns”. Alipoor rapidly abandons any idea of bringing his own background to bear on his inquiries, yet gives enough personal detail to propel any audience into what follows. Casually vivid, this “Bradford-built” British-Iranian, brought up on Abba and Dylan and hummus, remembers two childish hands clasping each other: both pink. His schoolfriend’s palm was stained with tomato ketchup, his own with pomegranate juice.
Going to Wikipedia for information about Farrokhzad, he rabbit-holes, accumulates and fractures data, branches out into comparisons. Videos of spreading constellations, constantly shifting images whirl behind him. He uncovers the history of another persecuted Iranian musician, Raam Emami, seen first virtually and then on stage, whose history brings home to a mostly non-Iranian, mostly non-refugee audience some of the circumstances experienced by Farrokhzad. Writing in collaboration with Chris Thorpe, Alipoor also turns to the idea of investigation by murder mystery podcast. Above the stage, Asha Reid very shrewdly skewers the genre with her eating-the-mic, penetrating tones, suggestive eyebrows and emphatic though unproved assertion that “the more you know the more you understand”.
There are no answers or solutions, but there is a new alertness. Every comparison, including the idea that Farrokhzad was “an Iranian Tom Jones”, is dismantled. All translations are imperfect. We “get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them”: not Alipoor in 2022 but George Eliot 150 years ago. Her chief metaphor was also that of a web, though hers was not worldwide. Alipoor projects her argument and his own by making a show that is not like anything else.
Pity the talented cast enmired in The Sex Party. Lisa Dwan, having to semaphore vampishness and anger by flashing her legs and shoulders in dresses that look like animated sticking plasters. Timothy Hutton (star of the 1980 film Ordinary People) grumping along as a wealthy reactionary, though why do his jogging bottoms look so Lidl? No one is supplied with layers, just an accumulation of lines.
Terry Johnson’s new play, which is directed by the dramatist, flounders at pretty much every turn. Chortling title. Stale situation: a swingers’ party at which every couple will eventually reveal their secrets. Pop-up personalities, who include a spinning-eyed Slavic woman who brandishes a knife and talks at length about her encounter with wounded butterflies. “Are you the butterfly?” asks the wide-eyed ingenue of the group.
Things are not improved by a lurch of plot halfway through, as if a bring-it-up-to-date rewrite had suddenly been demanded. A transgender woman joins the party, entering the kitchen, where all the dialogue takes place, to the accompaniment of occasional off stage moans and grunts by those supposedly “at it” in the next room. Played with elegant coolness by Pooya Mohseni, she is the closest the play comes to producing an inflected character. A murmur of humanity threatens to enter the proceedings with her, but what follows is a mechanical parroting of opinions about gender. A range of views seem to have been garnered, shuffled and handed out among the cast. Hostility, bewilderment, denial, prurience, preening. Mohseni is diminished by this, looking simply like a device to provoke this improbable candour.
Tim Shortall’s rich design, brimming with culinary detail, is not enough to redeem the sloppiness of the action or the dialogue; it is weird, in such a winking play, to let the word “banquette” go without a raised eyebrow. Johnson has previously teased with comic sex stereotypes – in Dead Funny and Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick. Here, he is trapped by them.
Star ratings (out of five)
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World ★★★★
The Sex Party ★
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is at Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 26 November
The Sex Party is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 7 January
