"Empty" and "White Rabbit, Red Rabbit"; Iranian Playwright in Edinburgh

The Fringe section of the Edinburgh Festival, which hosts thousands of performances from around the world every year, is being held this year without any shows from inside Iran. However, an Iranian playwright named Nasim Soleimanpour has two works in this section that will be performed on different days during the festival in August: a show called "White Rabbit, Red Rabbit," which has been performed in the Fringe since 2011, and a new play titled "Empty" (Blank), which is being performed in Edinburgh for the first time this year. Both plays are experimental works that progress based on interaction with the audience and vary with each performance. Ross Munro, who met Soleimanpour for the first time at the Fajr Theater Festival and brought "White Rabbit, Red Rabbit" to Edinburgh, says this young Iranian showed him his first play in English, and after reading it, he decided to stage it: "Nasim speaks from the perspective of his generation; a generation born amid the hardships of the Iran-Iraq war, now in their late twenties and early thirties; a generation that has not seen Iran without the Islamic Republic, yet is familiar with computers and remarkably informed." There is no doubt that British theater—and consequently the Edinburgh Festival—is fundamentally conservative, making it difficult for modern and experimental theater to thrive. The name of the playwright is still written much larger than that of the director on the posters of performances at the National Theatre (or City Theatre), and most shows remain heavily reliant on dialogue and are extremely classical. In this environment, the distinctiveness of shows like "White Rabbit, Red Rabbit" and "Empty" can be seen as an advantage and naturally attract some attention. However, I believe both plays, despite their modern appearance, are fundamentally based on the same classic idea: the elimination of the director and the emphasis on the playwright. Both plays essentially lack a director. The sealed envelope containing the script is opened by an actor, and the performance proceeds according to the playwright's instructions, involving the audience. In "White Rabbit, Red Rabbit," five audience members come on stage and take on the role of rabbits until one of them is designated as the red rabbit. Meanwhile, there are two glasses of water, one of which contains poison. At the end of the performance, the actor must choose one and drink it. The playwright discusses whether he should do this or not, and through this, he talks about methods of suicide. The new play titled "Empty" continues this very method. An actor who has not read the text opens the envelope and encounters sentences with blanks, facing the word "empty" that he must fill in, sometimes providing personal information about himself. Then it is one of the audience members' turns to come on stage and answer each question about their past with a word they write on a white page. The performance progresses, and the playwright tells us that this is not a play about the past; consequently, the character created on stage reaches the present, then to the future, and ultimately to death. In fact, the initial idea about the concept of time and the meaning of death, and the exploration of the past while arriving and living in the present, can be an attractive idea, but it suffers in form and execution and does not achieve the necessary coherence, just as "White Rabbit, Red Rabbit" had the same problem. In the absence of a director, everything is reduced to a moment that can easily fail to take shape and keep us outside the world of the play. One of the main—and most likely—reasons could be the actor's inability to improvise alongside a lack of mastery over the text. In the performance I witnessed, the actor sometimes had to repeat certain sentences multiple times to read them correctly, occasionally asking the "producer" what to do next, and fundamentally, this young woman as an actor lacked the power and ability to create a situation that could engage the audience. As a result, the performance was inevitably approaching failure. Moreover, the text of the play—aside from the complete repetition of the idea of the previous play, which no longer holds appeal for an audience member who has seen "White Rabbit, Red Rabbit" and is also repetitive—sometimes seems vague and aimless.