Nassim Soleimanpour’s global cult smash ‘White Rabbit, Red Rabbit’ was an ingenious response to the fact that the Iranian playwright was at the time unable to leave his home country. He wrote a sly subversive script designed for a different actor to perform cold every night, pointedly acting as stand ins for the writer who was physically banned from travel.
It was good, but was it so good that it justified him making an entire career out of variations thereof? As with 2017’s ‘Nassim’, ‘ECHO’ – staged as part of this year’s LIFT festival – has its moments but struggles to really find a truly compelling reason for being performed by a cold reader (on press night the redoubtable Adrian Lester).
What the production - directed by metatheatrical master Omar Elerian - does bring to the table is a heap more cool techy stuff than the ultra lo-fi ‘White Rabbit…’, and an awful lot more of Soleimanpour himself.
Early on, our performer (Lester) is put into apparent live video contact with Soleimanpour, who merrily bumbles about his Berlin flat – where he lives with his wife, and dog Echo – chatting away inanely to his bemused star.
‘Echo’ does two things well.
It is excellent on the nature of what it is to have a divided self as a result of emigration, as most specifically embodied by the fact Soleimanpour finds himself unable to clearly say where his home is. He has left Iran, yet Iran never leaves him, and he does not seem to have an emotional connection with Berlin. He is not a refugee. But that makes things more complicated; a life spent flitting between his troubled homeland and his more prosaic adopted home, never sure if he will complete his journeys without detention.
And the lengthy video sequences are on the whole superb, especially the scene that moves from apparent liveness to a ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’-indebted journey around Soleimanpour’s various lives and pasts.
But with the playwright himself now such a prominent presence as a performer, the need for Lester (or whoever) to be his physical proxy feels diminished and the actor often feels like he’s mostly there to provide a live focal point for what is largely a video work. It’s not like there is no point to the performer. But there is unquestionably less point.
There is also the nagging sense that brilliant as ‘White Rabbit, Red Rabbit’ was conceptually, Soleimanpour isn’t necessarily a particularly great writer of text – when ‘ECHO’ gets serious the writing drifts into vaguely hippieish stuff about how we’re all interconnected. It’s an excuse for some cool cosmic projections, but does border on the cliched.
At its best ‘ECHO’ is moving, profound and visually stunning, but it comes saddled with a load of baggage from Soleimanpour being ‘the cold read guy’. And while it’s fascinating to see how far that format can be pushed with the collaboration of a talent like Elerian and the big-name stars signed up for this run, I can’t help but feel Soleimanpour is now stuck with this form rather than being a master of it.
Performance schedule:
13 July, 7.30pm: Fiona Shaw
15 July, 7.30pm: Benedict Wong
16 July, 7.30pm: Sheila Atim
17 July, 7.00pm: Adrian Lester (press night)
18 July, 7.30pm: Jeremy O Harris
19 July, 7.30pm: Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem
20 July, 1.30pm: Monica Dolan (matinee)
20 July, 6.30pm: Emilia Clarke
22 July, 7.30pm: Meera Syal
23 July, 7.30pm: Jodie Whittaker
24 July, 7.30pm: Mawaan Rizwan
25 July, 7.30pm: Jessica Gunning
26 July, 7.30pm: Nick Mohammed
27 July, 1.30pm: Toby Jones (matinee)
27 July, 6.30pm: Kathryn Hunter (evening)