The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with nearly 3,500 shows. This year, Playbill is in Edinburgh for the entire month in August for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we're sharing which ones you absolutely must see if you're only at the Fringe for a short amount of time. Consider these Playbill Picks a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
If you could identify the essence of modern culture right now, what would it be? Well, as Javaad Alipoor points out in his Fringe show, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, it's probably a murder mystery podcast. He's not wrong—at this year's Fringe, there's a hit musical where the main characters host a murder mystery podcast. And the TV show Only Murders in the Building is inspired by murder mystery podcasts. Plus, there's all the real podcasts out there. People love to talk about murder, theorize about it, claim that they're the expects on a case after listening to a tidy and tightly produced hour-long episode—pretending that it's possible to truly know something after only one hour.
And that is how Alipoor sets up his inventive and complex new show. Alipoor presents to us a murder that has never been solved: of Iranian singer and political activist Fereydoun Farrokhzad, who fled Iran following the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and who was found brutally murdered in 1992 in Germany.
In the show, Alipoor attempts to make sense of Farrokhzad's murder and what he meant in the context of Iranian history and culture, and also tries to make us (a non-Iranian audience) understand—to truly feel what Iranians felt during the bloody aftermath of the Revolution, and what they're feeling now as the Iranian protests for human rights is underway.
And Alipoor does not, in the typical theatrical first-person way, use just himself as a half Iranian, half British man to translate Iranian history and culture for non-Iranians. Instead he employs two ingenious methods: one is by having another actor, Asha Reid, recite the murder case of Farrokhzad in the style of a murder podcast (with a self-serious theme music to accompany it). The other (and this is the most moving and visceral way) is through the testimonials of King Raam (aka Ramin Seyed-Emami), a contemporary Iranian musician who has become a political target because of his critiques of the current Iranian regime.
And throughout, Alipoor interrupts the action to remind us of just how flawed our current information systems are. Tools like Wikipedia give us "the delusion that the world is somehow knowable," he says—but that doesn't mean we can truly know. That information is always filtered and condensed before it is given to the readers.
All of this on the surface seems like it would be a mess of the show. And Alipoor's sections do come off sometimes as didactic, spelling out what he wants us to know instead of letting us discover it for ourselves. But that doesn't take away from the show's powerful impact (and the transportive video design Limbic Cinema and scenic design by Ben Brockman help to keep the different threads coherent).
When I've been trying to distill what Things Hidden is about for the purpose of this review, it keeps slipping through my fingers. Because throughout the show, Alipoor refuses to create easy points of entry for the audience for us to hold onto. Alipoor begins by saying that Farrokhzad is "the Iranian Tom Jones," but says that such a comparison is foolish because "Tom Jones is the Iranian Tom Jones." And also, such a comparison does not accurately capture how Farrokhzad was as an icon to Iranians, and the emotional devastation his death caused amongst the diaspora.
The closest thing that the show has to an emotional anchor is through Raam. It's through his moving, first-person accounts that we come close to understanding what it is to be a target for political persecution. Not empathy, of course, that would be impossible. And that is the method in this madness of a show. All of these different elements coalesce into something truly remarkable, a brain-teaser of a production that will leave you pondering and unpacking days later.
The show reminds us that we do not need to truly know something to understand it or to appreciate it. Translation may be an inexact process, but Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World brilliantly revels in the attempt.
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is running at the Traverse Theatre until August 27. Click here for tickets.
Raam Emami, Javaad Alipoor, and Me-Lee Hay
Raam Emami, Javaad Alipoor, and Me-Lee Hay
Javaad Alipoor
Javaad Alipoor
Javaad Alipoor in Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World
Javaad Alipoor and Raam Emami
Javaad Alipoor
Javaad Alipoor
Raam Emami and Me-Lee Ha in Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World
