In 2013 I wrote of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit:
So it was with some hesitation that I approached the playwright’s latest
project, which is simply titled after the playwright’s first name Nassim.
Because I suppose that, if you were going to realise a self-valorising
objective as an artist, you would create a play titled after yourself. Hmmm.
Almost a sequel to the globally successful White Rabbit, Red Rabbit,
Nassim does a lot to elucidate that initial project. The audience
arrives on the premise not unlike its predecessor: that they will see another
play in which the script is read by an actor (an obliging Thomas Spencer for
the premiere) who did not yet read it. However, a twist is thrown in while the
house lights are still up: this time, the actor would be reading from a
projected screen. Nope, wrong again. This time, we would be blessed with the
presence of the playwright himself, as Soleimanpour is fetched by the actor and
brought to the stage to wild applause.
Image: David Monteith-Hodge/Studio Doug
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At which point, this really becomes the Nassim show. For a playwright
(who sometimes have a year-long response time), Soleimanpour has a great sense
of wit and timing when interacting in his second language, and the play
proceeds through some entertaining modes of Farsi class, learning about each
other’s lives, and storytelling – always returning to a faintly nihilist ‘what
do we do next?’ moment hovering in the air. Through this, we are offered
seemingly private information about the playwright, discovered through
interactions with him via the premise of learning: we get to view his passport,
we get to send a message to his wife, and we even get to speak with his mother
in Iran.
The play has some great moments, such as the audience’s initial
discovery that the video projection is a live one, which happens through the
learning of a new English word (for the premiere ‘solitude’). Soleimanpour’s
concern with fairy tales plays well as a link between himself and an audience,
as does his distance from family. The mode of gaming – not ‘play’ in Schiller’s
sense, but more in a decision-making or game theory sense – is effective in
creating a friendly and light environment in the theatre, in which people feel
free to make contributions and occasionally to break the rules. There are times
in Nassim when it’s almost like interacting with an AI: a sort of call
and response, or a reward/punishment device.
Soleimanpour also remains standing in naïve wonder before language and
its power, and this levity/gravity has some interesting results, many of them
oscillating freely between tear-jerking manipulation and a sort of casual
freedom.
But I found myself again left empty by Nassim. Not only does it
repeat White Rabbit’s mythologizing of Iran (here there is an
unexplained throwaway line “These things happen, right? Especially in a country
like Iran.” Which, among the western media’s hyperventilative characterisations
of the country, could mean anything) but there’s a new layer of fabrication of
risk that is even more disappointing. Given that the playwright consistently emphasises
how high the stakes are, the fact that it was a constant question for me of
‘what are the stakes here?’ is a point of interest.
Connected with this, whilst the journey pretends to be one of pedagogy
and exchange with the audience, it is important to ask, apart from the
omniscient position of the playwright, what is really learned. This is, for me,
an important point, not only because it divides a play like Nassim from pedagogically-focused experiments such as Brecht's Lehrstücke. As with White Rabbit, this lies exactly at the intersection of the
playwright's background and his Western audience. And it makes me wonder: is
this what really provides the satisfaction in both White Rabbit and Nassim?
That, in principle, reaffirmation of that core western value: individualism,
today transformed into self-promotion, transferred through the vessel of the
writer? Is humanism today really reducible to such simple universals as missing
one’s mother, or having a house with a balcony? If, threatened again by contact
with this other world of Iran, we leave the theatre only with our preconceived
ideas restored, then what was really learned? Was this really about learning
about ‘the other’, or simply an affirmation, disguised as learning?
Such a question reveals the staging of seemingly high-stakes theatre
into low-stakes tricks. Truly high-stakes would be a much more self-critical, self-aware
play, where the author offers something of himself to be negotiated. Where he
fundamentally says something he does not want to say.
I saw that in 2014's Blind Hamlet, but it is not present here.
That may not matter to Soleimanpour, who seems concerned here with
consolidating his oeuvre – nor to his audience, who will appreciate a
re-affirmation of family, home, and the common humanity we all no doubt share.
Nassim
Written and performed by Nassim Soleimanpour
Directed by Omar Elerian
Designed by Rhys Jarman
Sound Design by James Swadlo
Lighting Design by Rajiv Pattani
Script Editors: Carolina Ortega and Stewart Pringle
English Theater Berlin
Until January 17th
For a list of performers each night, see the English Theatre Berlin
website: https://www.etberlin.de/production/nassim/
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