Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If an actor steps on to a stage without knowing a single line of the script, that is usually a disaster. In Nassim Soleimanpour’s Echo, it’s the whole point. Soleimanpour, an Iranian artist now living in Berlin, has crafted an intricate, fascinating “cold read” piece, which a different actor delivers — completely unrehearsed — every night (I saw Monica Dolan). The result is playful, elusive, sometimes frustrating and ultimately moving: a boldly experimental piece that meditates on home, on belonging and on the way both theatre and technology can seemingly bend time and shrink the space between people.The actor steps out on to a stage adorned only by a desk, a laptop, a Persian rug and several screens. They then respond to instructions, transmitted via a screen or earpiece, reading aloud to the audience from a script on the laptop and talking with Soleimanpour, who dials in, apparently live, from his apartment in the German capital. But technology can be deceptive. The author, a genial, likeable presence, chats away with his protagonist, beaming down at them from a giant screen, and takes both them and us with him, via his camera, as he pops into his kitchen to talk to his wife, pets his dog and heads out of his front door. Then suddenly everything shifts and the apparently live feed slips into something else: a surreal, traumatic encounter with a government official. Are we in Berlin or back in Iran? Are we still live, or not? Who is the actor representing — themselves or the writer? As the show shifts through its different levels, we are soon unmoored ourselves, experiencing an inkling of the writer’s own disorientation.Echo picks up on Soleimanpour’s previous work White Rabbit Red Rabbit, written when he was not allowed to leave Iran, and emphasises the interface in live theatre between formal script and spontaneity. Here the script itself ponders that blurring of past and present: theatre, suggests Soleimanpour, can act as a time capsule and close the distance between then and now, here and there. For him that becomes a way of sharing the immigrant experience.Gradually, the show wanders into grander, rather windier ruminations about connection, deploying projections of the galaxy. It is better and more powerful when it sticks closer to the intimate, considering what “home” means and the ways art can defy borders, barriers and even time to connect us. It is a great vote of confidence in the director, Omar Elerian, who has created something solid yet flexible, and the actor, brave enough to expose themselves to the unknown. Dolan delivered it beautifully: open, droll and frank in response, and, by the end, clearly genuinely moved by the weight of her task.★★★★☆To July 27, royalcourttheatre.com
