[title]
Javaad Alipoor’s new show is – very explicitly – the theatrical version of a wild Wikipedia dive.
The Bradford-raised, Manchester-based performer and theatremaker is known for the zeitgeisty teched-up verve of his work, having come to prominence with 2017’s brilliant ‘The Believers are But Brothers’, a play about Islamic fundamentalism that barraged audience members with aggresive WhatsApp messages. Follow up ‘Rich Kids’ traced the life and death of two spoilt Iranian brats via their Instagram posts.
And ‘Things Hidden Since the Beginning of the World’ is his Wikipedia play.
Well, that’s part of it, anyway.
Every Wikipedia hole needs an entry point, and ‘Things Hidden’s is Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a popular Iranian singer and TV host who fled the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
‘The Iranian Tom Jones’ Alipoor calls him, by way of explanation. He stands alone in front of a blank black wall on which images are projected of the extravagantly moustachioed Farrokhzad’s heyday in a ‘70s Iran that had rapidly taken colour television to its heart.
In exile he was increasingly outspoken about the hardline Islamic regime that he had fled. Or he was until August 7, 1992, when he was found murdered in his flat in Bonn, Germany. Despite obvious suspicions directed at the Iranian state, it”s a murder that has never been solved, and Alipoor spends some time pondering out loud how he should make a show about it. A sort of cold case, true crime affair? Or an earnest, personal show in which he draws his own Iranian heritage into the equation and attempts to enlighten, challenge and uplift his white British audience?
In fact ‘Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World’ – the name itself is a mini wiki-hole – dives away in a series of thrilling, mischievous tangents. Alipoor invites us to browse Wikipedia on our phones, and demonstrates how easy it to get trapped in a loop. He talks about how he spent much of lockdown reading about Jainism on Wikipedia, but still doesn’t really understand it. He explains that of course Farrokhzad wasn’t the Iranian Tom Jones: that’s just a sort of signifier that we might use to start to make sense of the world – the two men had very different careers (more accurately the internationally famous Tom Jones was the Iranian Tom Jones).
The point Alipoor is building up to is that the world is fundamentally subjective; objectively, it is unknowable. We can’t understand it from this show any better than we can from Wikipedia. It is absurd to think ‘Things Hidden’ was ever going to solve Farrokhzad]’s murder. ‘The more you know, the more you understand’ Alipoor says repeatedly, and with heavy irony. And yet – and this is the key thing – that doesn’t render the attempt to do so meaningless. Alipoor disappears from the stage, as we dive ahead and an upper compartment opens in Ben Brockman’s set to reveal performer Asha Reid, who stages a very arch cold case podcast looking into Farrokhzad’s murder. We dive further and meet a pre-recorded projection of King Raam (aka Raam Emani), an exiled contemporary Iranian musician, who talks about his own experience without reference to Farrokhzad, though the parallels are very obviously there. We dive yet further still and it turns out Raam is actually here in the room, performing songs with fellow musician Me-Lee Hay.
It’s clearly very, very meta, and will almost certainly infuriate anybody rocking up hoping for a good old-fashioned murder mystery. But the piece that Alipoor and co-writer Chris Thorpe have cooked up is isn’t just an indulgent show about a show. It is a wild, strange, exhilarating free-form creation that touches on the nature of reality itself, that both recognises the futility of trying to see the world truthfully but feels ablaze with the possibilities of the attempt.