Royal Court Theatre

Nassim Soleimanpour’s global cult smash ‘White Rabbit, Red Rabbit’ was an ingenious response to the fact that the Iranian playwright was at the time unable to leave his home country. He wrote a sly subversive script designed for a different actor to perform cold every night, pointedly acting as stand ins for the writer who was physically banned from travel. It was good, but was it so good that it justified him making an entire career out of variations thereof? As with 2017’s ‘Nassim’, ‘ECHO’ – staged as part of this year’s LIFT festival – has its moments but struggles to really find a truly compelling reason for being performed by a cold reader (on press night the redoubtable Adrian Lester). What the production - directed by metatheatrical master Omar Elerian - does bring to the table is a heap more cool techy stuff than the ultra lo-fi ‘White Rabbit…’, and an awful lot more of Soleimanpour himself. Early on, our performer (Lester) is put into apparent live video contact with Soleimanpour, who merrily bumbles about his Berlin flat – where he lives with his wife, and dog Echo – chatting away inanely to his bemused star.  ‘Echo’ does two things well.  It is excellent on the nature of what it is to have a divided self as a result of emigration, as most specifically embodied by the fact Soleimanpour finds himself unable to clearly say where his home is. He has left Iran, yet Iran never leaves him, and he does not seem to have an emotional connection with Berlin. He is not a refug

An urban myth is made flesh in this intriguing play from Tife Kusoro, which follows three schoolkids – Khaleem, Joy and Kai – as they come face to face with Baitface the Gullyman, a figure summoned when you walk underneath a pair of trainers thrown onto a telephone wire. It’s hard to get a read of ‘G’ without actually seeing it, but it certainly sounds worth a look.  

Even though it was actually commissioned for the Bridge Theatre – which has been unable to stage it because of the blockbuster success of ‘Guys and Dolls’ – Mark Rosenblatt’s ‘Giant’ looks set to be the defining piece of programming of David Byrne’s Royal Court tenure, or certainly of the first year. There’s the director, for a start: Bridge and former National Theatre boss Nicholas Hytner seemed to be the antithesis of what the previous Court regime stood for – he’s not boring, but he’s certainly mainstream. And then there’s the subject: first-time playwright Rosenblatt’s play is about beloved children’s author Roald Dahl’s notorious antisemitism, something most of us are familiar with in the abstract while being vague about the exact details. Not only is it a potentially incendiary subject at a time when Dahl’s back catalogue is being milked on stage and screen like never before, but a play calling out antisemitism feels like a statement intent for Byrne’s time at the Court given the theatre has diced with several antisemitism scandals over the years. Intriguingly ‘Giant’ has a link back to the biggest of those scandals. It co-stars actor Elliot Levey as Dahl’s horrified Jewish agent; Levey is the son-in-law of Ken Loach, director of the scandalous drama ‘Perdition’ that Court shelved in 1987 in the face of protests that it was antisemitic; in 1999 a young Levey actually staged a scrubbed up version of ‘Perdition’ at the Gate Theatre. All very fascinating, though for most n