English: Sanaz Toossi

RSC. The Other Place, Stratford Upon Avon

Runs: 1h 30m, no interval, till 01 June 2024, 5 – 29 June 2024 at Kiln Theatre, London

5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: Roderick Dungate.

AD Performance 25 May 2024.

“Multi-Layered Exploration of Identity.”

Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer winning play is excellent. Iranian-American, she sets her play in a Iranian classroom in which adults are learning English. The play looks simple, the narrative is straightforward, but her clever artwork enables the exploration of a huge theme, the depth to which our identity is tied up with our language and/or how much our language is tied up with our identity.

Toossi puts together a carefully selected group of character’s; Marjan, the teacher, recently returned from 9 years in Manchester, Goli, new to the class, Roya, older, learning English to visit her son and grandchildren in Canada, Omid, a man who speaks English quite well after some years in the US, Elham, struggling to learn and often angry and frustrated with her progress. Tensions, frictions, happinesses shape the characters’ journeys as they learn truths (often disturbing truths) about themselves. We care about these people, and not all endings are happy ones.

Toossi has the enviable skill of hitting great revelations in the simplest of lines. For instance as Erhan pours out her heart (in hesitant English) ‘I am idiot’, she is required to correct her syntax, ‘I am an idiot’. The result is funny and staggeringly heartbreaking.

All such moments are made possible in a clever concept. The whole play is spoken in English, but with consummate skill the actors unfailingly let us know when they are speaking their native Farsi or their basic English.

A true ensemble presentation and all performances are strong. Anisha Field’s design is a simple classroom, but with a stroke of inspiration we are enabled, just about, to glimpse the world beyond the classroom.

What a privilege it is to be offered this view into someone else’s world, to be, for a moment, part of that world, and to share their challenges, whereby the challenges are made universal challenges.

Cast

Marjan – Nadia Albina

Goli- Sara Hazemi

Roya – Lanna Joffrey

Omid – Nojan Khazai

Elham – Serena Manteghi

Creatives

Writer – Sanaz Toossi

Director – Diyan Zora

Designer – Anisha Fields – Lighting – Elliot Griggs

Sound – George Dennis

Movement – Maria Tarokh