Echo at the Royal Court

 

A last minute change of plan saw me heading to the Royal Court after Skeleton Crew was cancelled at the Donmar.

The Royal Court is leaning into an experimental phase at the moment and this is no exception.  Like Bluets, this makes use of loads of technology but in this case we have different actors each night, unprepared and unrehearsed, cold-reading the play, partnering and standing in for the playwright who joins by webcam, apparently from his Berlin flat.   Tonight the actor was Nick Mohammed but unfortunately my last minute cheap seat was restricted view, and the staging meant that for about half the performance I couldn’t actually see him so a chunk of his performance was as a disembodied voice.  Wearing an earpiece which was feeding lines and stage directions, when I could see him, Mohammed looked remarkably calm as he responded to what was happening on screen or the directions he was being given.

The playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is Iranian, now living in Berlin, and he previously explored cold reading when he was unable to travel for performances and so various actors would stand in for him each night.  So this play explores identity (for example having two passports that do not reference the other), and sometimes using Mohammed as his stand in (or echo?) and other times as his foil,  considering the shapeshifting that is needed to change continents, countries and ways of life and stay alive and free in turbulent times.  The 80 minute long performance meditates on home, the upheavals and political situation in Iran, displacement, family, communication, connection, disconnection and hope.  A rug from Soleimanpour's home is the physical representative of the playwright in the London theatre, and the importance of walking on the carpet, building up memories and value through use, becomes a metaphor for the experience of life.

The use of screens means that is where our attention naturally rests and as well as playing out many of the events such as a border control interrogation or meeting his wife, family and friends, there are lovely images of planets, galaxies, stars as well as more earthly imagery of landscapes through the seasons.  Part poetry reading, part film show, technically this was very well put together and there were flashes of moving brilliance in here, although it felt a bit fragmented with a mix of the profound but just occasionally, taking an overly trite turn of phrase.   

Nick Mohammed stood up pretty well to the experience of being remotely directed in the moment and his understated style added a touch of bathos and bewilderment.  I’d love to see what some of the other performers would do - Fiona Shaw or Toby Jones for example are some of the starry names also giving this a whirl.

London seemed a bit quiet and it was still light when I came out from the theatre but it was a lovely evening so I took my usual stroll back across the river as I tried to make sense of what I had just seen.