first published by The Stage
Javaad Alipoor: ‘Our shows ask what the tech we use reveals about how we examine the world’
Javaad Alipoor has mixed documentary, lecture-performance and theatre for a trilogy of shows exploring technology and identity. The British-Iranian theatremaker tells Verity Healey about the evolution of the series and the message of the final production
“It’s good to riff,” Javaad Alipoor says to me when we meet to talk about his latest show.
He is referring to our conversation – we are both worried we have misunderstood each other or not been clear – but actually, Alipoor’s comment is a good descriptor of his shows, too. We are speaking during a break in rehearsals at HOME in Manchester, where the theatremaker’s new show, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, opens this month ahead of dates at London’s Battersea Arts Centre. Things Hidden is the third and final play in a trilogy by Alipoor and his collaborators about technology and identity. The series began with The Believers Are But Brothers in 2017, followed by Rich Kids: a History of Shopping Malls in Tehran in 2019.
If you think the titles sound more like academic lectures from a TV series, you would not be wrong – analysis of facts and data, and the urge to discuss and know, lie at the heart of the three plays. In Things Hidden, Asha Reid plays a podcaster unravelling the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of gay Iranian pop star, regime critic and humanitarian Fereydoun Farrokhzad in 1992. Alongside this, Raam Emami – an Iranian pop star who goes by the stage name King Raam, who is also a critic of the Iranian regime, a podcaster and an émigré – narrates his own real-life story of fleeing the Ayatollah’s long reach. All the while, Alipoor, a British Iranian, plays someone like himself, waxing lyrical about how contemporary technology impacts contemporary politics.
“What does the everyday tech we use reveal about how we examine the world?” This question is at the heart of the trilogy of plays, with each piece examining the same question from different angles, Alipoor explains.
The Believers Are But Brothers, which was co-directed by Kirsty Housley and won a Fringe First award in 2017, explored how young men who believe they are at the bottom of the social pile go on to find solace in alt-right and Isis recruitment chat-rooms.
Rich Kids, also co-created with Housley, is its opposite, says Natalie Diddams, a theatremaker, academic and Alipoor’s wife, who is the co-creator of Things Hidden. It looked at the children of elite leaders in places such as Iran, and what they do with their parent’s money. Hint: they do not support the Iranian revolution but are followers of Western materialistic values.
Theatremaker Chris Thorpe, who is dramaturg and a co-writer on Things Hidden, says both the first and second shows “focused on how communication tools [such as WhatsApp and Instagram], which have nothing to do with their users, have been intricately woven into people’s lives. Things Hidden looks at how we structure a conversation about the subject as much as the subject itself”. How the language we use and the way we use it plays into those bigger questions that the play asks.
As Alipoor puts it: “When I had a conversation with someone trying to explain who Fereydoun Farrokhzad is, they couldn’t understand because they weren’t Iranian. So, I described him as a kind of Tom Jones. Then I realised that what I was doing was a certain translation that puts its finger on what I think is at the heart of political slipperiness at the moment.”
What Things Hidden is trying to get at, via Farrokhzad’s and Emami’s stories, is how narratives are marshalled for a Western perspective, Alipoor says. By using Tom Jones to describe Farrokhzad, some parts of him might be understood from a Western perspective, but the sense of who Farrokhzad was and what he meant to Iranians is lost.
There is a moment early on in the show that tries to exemplify this, where the audience is asked to partake in an experiment involving Wikipedia. It illustrates just how small and simplistic the internet has made our world.
But the internet is not without hierarchy, Alipoor explains. “It’s all the more pressing because when you open the internet and see that young woman burning her hijab in Iran, there is a temptation to see all of that as a character in a set narrative, where we do all the talking. Everyone else is an example of the kind of story we marshal,” he says.
This is why Emami, telling his own story, is a big presence on stage. His father, an Iranian-Canadian professor called Kavous Seyed Emami, died in suspicious circumstances at the hands of the Iranian authorities in 2018. Emami had to flee Iran after his family suffered harassment from Iranian officials and has recently learned from the Canadian secret service that he is on the radar of the Iranian government.
There are certainly similarities between Emami’s and Farrokhzad’s stories. Neither wanted to be political, yet Emami now reluctantly admits that you cannot be Iranian and not be political. But he also talks about artistic responsibility: “I’m an artist with an extra layer,” he says. “Farrokhzad always said the reason why you are an artist and are where you are is because of the people supporting you. So when you witness oppression, you have a duty, an obligation to stand up and say something.”
In Things Hidden, Alipoor seems to be trying to find a bridge between these extra layers, these different worlds. This might be why he employs the lecture-performance trope, a device he used in both Believers and Rich Kids. Alipoor admits that this dynamic between the actors and the audience allows him to get certain ideas in people’s heads. One of these is audience trust – Emami compares Alipoor’s onstage persona in Things Hidden to that of a TED-talk presenter.
Alipoor’s role on stage and his relationship to the main action is different in each of the three shows. In Believers, Alipoor was an ambiguous narrator. There was an implication that he might not be too far removed from the young men in the show – “a night-time blogger, a little intimate, a little dark”, says Diddams. In Rich Kids, this persona developed into something more objective – Alipoor co-presented with Peyvand Sadeghian and led the audience through the story rather than being part of it.
In Things Hidden, his style has evolved further. Alipoor “has become more fluid, he does not slip into a character or feel the need to perform a story. He is talking as himself with some sense of personal connection to the story of Farrokhzad”, observes Diddams.
Personal connection is key. Alipoor used to listen to Farrokhzad’s music in his dad’s car in Bradford – his Iranian father came to the UK in the 1970s – and he has been obsessed with Farrokhzad’s story ever since.
Things Hidden is also perhaps the most humorous of the three shows. Diddams remarks that humour can be used “as a communal experience that can then be undercut”.
There is certainly a big moment in Things Hidden that humorously undermines audience expectations. But there are also scenes where Alipoor sends up his theatrical process as a tortured artist, as if interrogating his own position as a British Iranian.
There is certainly a big moment in Things Hidden that humorously undermines audience expectations. But there are also scenes where Alipoor sends up his theatrical process as a tortured artist, as if interrogating his own position as a British Iranian.
He has invented his own chatty onstage persona, who narrates, observes and interrogates all in one. Diddams admits this is perhaps the only practical format if “you want to talk about being gay, religion, Farrokhzad, the fall of the Berlin Wall and global politics, and how all that looks from different angles”.
His plays are “like Javaad is as a person: so good at making links between different ideas”, she adds.
So, a kind of theatrical riffing, then? Case in point: When I ask Alipoor to describe his creative process and motivation, he starts off saying one thing and then has a change of heart, fishing for an anecdote instead.
“When Trump got elected, I had all these American friends ringing me up crying on the phone. I thought: ‘I can’t do this.’ So what I did was spend the next three days trawling through the exit-poll data from the New York Times to see who voted for Trump and who didn’t, and came to the conclusion that all it needed, next time around, was 78 liberal, rich, white, middle-class women in Georgia to vote the right way.”
“It’s that feeling,” he explains. “Trying to find a way, exploring it, trying to send it up.”
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is at HOME, Manchester, until November 5, and at Battersea Arts Centre, London, from November 9-26