A different actor takes to the Royal Court’s stage each night in Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s play ECHO (“Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen”) which explores home, time, immigration and the places those themes intersect as part of LIFT (London’s International Festival of Theatre).
Each actor is unrehearsed and has no knowledge of the script they are about to perform – tonight, on press night, we are in the hands of Adrian Lester. The run has already featured Fiona Shaw, Sheila Atim and Benedict Wong, with Emilia Clarke, Meera Syal, Toby Jones, Kathryn Hunter, Jodie Whittaker and more still to come.
Though the play is unfamiliar to the actor, the approach is not unfamiliar to Soleimanpour – his plays White Rabbit, Red Rabbit and NASSIM have followed the same cold, unrehearsed format. The ambition seems to be to cast the performer in Soleimanpour’s image – slightly lost and adrift from the sense of himself and his place in the world.
The result is mixed in Omar Elerian’s production. With Lester unsure what is coming next, his lines come out in a flat, often stilted manner. Yes, our performer is lost – but perhaps not quite in the way intended. It is a result of the format, not Lester’s acting skills. Perhaps at the third time of outing, the gimmick is becoming a little worn.
Not to give too much away, but Soleimanpour also makes highly personable appearances via live video call from his Berlin flat throughout proceedings. His home is economically replicated on the Royal Court stage (no set designer is credited), down to his Persian rug, and backed by three screens on which the physical and metaphysical are represented in turn. You see, as well as feel, Soleimanpour pulling the strings of this tale. Make no mistake, there is heart here.
ECHO, though, is at its strongest in its most experimental moments – beyond gimmickry – in a speech about time, space and matter where Soleimanpour finds and mines his thematic intersections, and prose and poetry meet too.
