Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Jan 19 – 21, 2024
Playwright: Javaad Alipoor, Chris Thorpe
Director: Javaad Alipoor
Cast: Javaad Alipoor, Raam Emami, Asha Reid
Images by Chris Payne
Theatre review
It was 1992 when queer Iranian popstar Fereydoun Farrokhzad was found murdered in exile. To the English-speaking world, theatre maker Javaad Alipoor would describe Farrokhzad as Iran’s answer to Tom Jones, but that description is of course fraught with inaccuracies. Being Persian-English and child of an immigrant, Alipoor is sensitive to his existence as being simultaneously two things, and being in-between. It is a colonised experience of never really being whole, described by the term “subalternity”, which Alipoor introduces at the beginning of his show Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.
When in a position of subordination, one is keenly aware of the futility and impotence, of not just translations across boundaries, but also of the very phenomenon of meaning creation itself, especially in the current moment, when the availability of information seems to exist only as chains of replication on the internet. Alipoor talks a lot about Wikipedia, as a model of how we try to understand things in the modern age, and the rabbit holes that our venerated technologies engender. There is an inexhaustibility to the representation of facts, but truth is elusive. His concepts for Things Hidden are valuable, but they are expressed in complicated ways, which pose a real challenge for our minds, and one can be fairly certain that to attain a high level of concurrent comprehension for the wordy (and speedy) text, is probably an impracticable exercise.
Alipoor’s intricate and perplexing expressions are however, unquestionably theatrical. Things Hidden is an entrancing work. With stage, costume and lighting design by Benjamin Brockman, we observe a sophistication and confidence, that underpin the characteristic abstruseness of the show. Along with Limbic Cinema’s correspondingly complicated video projections, the overall visual effect is kaleidoscopic and quite beguiling. Music by Raam Emami, performed live by Me-Lee Hay (along with other members of cast), is consistently gripping, always on hand to manufacture an air of urgency. Sound design by Simon McCorry adds to the general flamboyance, for a production that insists on our attentiveness, even when we feel unable to absorb enough of the goings on.
As performer, Alipoor’s august presence maintains a believability for his material, which he offers with great conviction, in a somewhat instructional style. The previously mentioned Emami charms the audience with his personal anecdotes, delivered with exceptional affability, in sections of the show that feel more accessible. Asha Reid, completely convincing in the role of a podcaster, impresses with the velocity and precision, with which she attacks the density of the text, written by Alipoor and Chris Thorpe.
In watching Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, one experiences something that can probably de described as the visceral effects of knowing. This happens with so much of art, when our brains feel like they might be drawing a blank, but other aspects of our corporeality go through their own processes of ingestion and interpretation. With time, we discover a certain growth, one that might appear much later than perhaps anticipated. The nature of knowledge might be deeply byzantine, but within this existence, there are few things more gratifying, than when we know.
Suzy Goes See 