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.
