Since its creation in 2010, Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has achieved the unlikeliest of theatrical fates: it is understood to be both experimental and successful. It has been performed in more than thirty languages and by actors as starry as Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, and Whoopi Goldberg. As with several of Soleimanpour’s other works, White Rabbit – presented by the Malthouse Theatre in 2013 – relied on the conceit that it is performed each night by a different actor who has never seen the script before, thus generating a particular kind of frisson by amplifying the audience’s uncertainty and sense of uncovering the text along with the unrehearsed performer. I saw it in Adelaide during a long-distant Fringe, performed by the redoubtable Amber McMahon, but recall its interweaving of fable, philosophy, and audience interaction only dimly. The play’s intention, I think, was both to schematically explore the oppressiveness of the Iranian regime and to stand in for the playwright himself who, although now Berlin-based, was not, at the time of the play’s writing, able to present his work in his own country.      

In his latest play, ECHO – the name, we learn, of the playwright’s dog, as well as, for reasons unclear to me, an acronym for ‘every cold-hearted oxygen’ – Soleimanpour again reprises the same concept (an echo, dare I say, of his earlier works?). It begins with a stagehand erecting a live-feed camera on a tripod placed to one side of the set: a mostly black space comprising a writing desk and chair and several suspended screens in various sizes and orientations. The performer – on opening night, the square-jawed, resonant-voiced Ben Lawson – then takes their place on a chair behind a scrim and proceeds to dialogue with what sounds like an AI voice agent. Lawson is audibly nervous at first but soon relaxes, especially when the agent falls silent and is replaced by the playwright himself, bespectacled and owlish, in a live video feed connecting the black box Merlyn Theatre with Soleimanpour’s spartan Berlin flat. The set, the playwright explains, has been designed to resemble the flat, and further intriguing congruities emerge. Lawson, like Soleimanpour, is married and has a dog but no children, and the role – an unambiguous proxy of the playwright himself – requires the performer to don white socks and black slippers of the kind we see Soleimanpour wearing.

Ben Lawson (photograph by Eugene Hyland)

What follows is an absorbing albeit meandering treatise on family, belonging, and the immigrant experience blending live and recorded video and live performance. At different times, Lawson, who is mic’ed throughout, is called upon to read from a computer screen or sheet of paper, follow instructions and voice dialogue fed to him via an earpiece, and converse with the playwright in real time. Under the sure hand of director Omar Elerian, what starts simply grows in complexity as what we see on the screens comes to resemble film in its production values, narrative heft, and increasingly dreamlike quality. This footage also begins to ‘interact’ with the live performance in unexpected ways, unsettling our sense of what is ‘real’ in any given moment. Derek Richards’s projections effectively conjure landscapes both cosmic and autumnal, especially when twinned with Anna Clock’s pensive sound design, and particularly impressive is a late sequence in which Soleimanpour appears magically to share the same physical space with Lawson. Unlike in White Rabbit, there is no audience interaction, although we are often partially illuminated by the house lights (the lighting design is by Jackie Shemesh) as a means, one supposes, of gently disturbing our passivity.

Soleimanpour’s text often reaches for a kind of poetry – the Persian lyric poet Hafez, name-checked more than once, is clearly an inspiration – and occasionally succeeds. There are times when Lawson is visibly moved by what he’s reading as it evokes sweeping themes of love, time, connection, and the role of storytelling in our lives, and we, in turn, are moved too. But elsewhere the effect is, frankly, more reminiscent of the work of Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur – general, naïve, and ultimately rather sentimental (deepities like ‘the universe is not made of atoms but the bonds between them’ abound). There is something, too, if not exactly smug about the playwright’s presence in the work, then at least overweening, a persona – however constructed – that seems overly invested in its own self-presentation. It all, in the end, feels not so much cold- as half-hearted, and incongruously removed from world events. With war, genocide, and authoritarian creep unfolding on our screens minute-by-minute, Soleimanpour’s predilection for the true but trivial feels vexing. Like me, audiences will, no doubt, be curious about how each performer will differently inflect the work – also slated to appear are Michelle Brasier, David Campbell, Jan Fran, Nadine Garner, Pia Miranda, and Stan Grant. It’s just a pity that Soleimanpour could not have conceived of a more substantial vehicle for their talents.

ECHO: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen continues at the Malthouse Theatre until 19 July 2025. Performance attended: July 15.