Tag: nassim soleimanpour

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The Unpredictablity of Live Performance

In 2011, the joint premiere of the play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was held at the Edinburgh Fringe and at the SummerWorks Festival in Toronto. Most playwrights would be left with the difficult decision of which one to attend, but for Nassim Soleimanpour, the decision was made for him.

At the time, he wasn’t allowed to leave Iran, having refused to take part in compulsory military service there. Performing a play usually requires a lot of discussion between the playwright, the director, the actors and the crew, so how was this one staged with one crucial element removed?

In short, the script travelled the world without him, and didn’t require a director nor a set. In front of an audience, the actor takes the script from the envelope and performs a cold reading. Of course, you have only one opportunity to hold a cold reading, so the trade-off with this method is that a different actor is required for every performance, with a 2024 revival attracting some big names.

Soleimanpour was finally granted a passport in 2013, but the format remains untouched.

While I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, I was reminded of the unpredictable energy of live performance after seeing a recent reading of a different kind. This was done by my pal Luca Cockayne at Generator Projects in Dundee. He’s undergoing medical transition, which is baked into some of his work.

After his first poem, the unexpected surprise was to take his regular injection of testosterone live on stage. Furthermore, the vial had been hidden in plain sight under his artwork on the wall, so it was case of walking over to grab it. During the injection, a Bluetooth speaker played a selection of pre-recorded poetry with his voice electronically modulated into different registers.

The audience were, of course, warned in advance. However, nobody left; in fact, nobody even averted their eyes. What can I say? We were an arty audience who thrived on this stuff, however unanticipated.

I’m now rather jaded when it comes to live readings, so it really needs to be something special to stand out, but that performance was definitely in my top unexpected moments. To find an equivalent, I probably have to go back to 2014, when I was invited to perform on a bill at Dundee University Student Association. I wrote a little about that performance at the time, and it produced two highlights.

One former friend performed a piece as if he were a manager showing a new recruit around an office building. There were two microphones on the stage and after each paragraph, he wandered over to the other one. I thought this was a terrific idea to emphasise the wandering nature of the piece. I told him as much later on, although he admitted that was improvised upon seeing two microphones were available.

Another performer walked onto the stage with a rucksack. After his introduction, he ran around the room giving out chocolate bars from the bag. He dubbed my poetry as ‘awesome’, which I held in high regard as I was new to writing verse.

I also have one more lasting impression from that night. The purple mood lighting was so prevalent that it inspired a further poem the following month, although I didn’t have a chance to perform it on that stage under that lighting.

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Das Experiment.

From Thursday to Saturday this week, Nassim Soleimanpour’s experimental play White Rabbit Red Rabbit will be performed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Siobhan Redmond, Phill Jupitus and Ewen Bremner will have had no direction, no rehearsals, and no idea of what their lines will be. Instead, the script is placed in an envelope that will be opened in front of the audience just before the performance begins.

The play’s structure was influenced by the sanctions against the writer. He is a conscientious objector against military service in his native Iran, and is not allowed to leave that country. A symbolic empty seat is left in the front row of each performance.

I’m in the habit of listening to The New Yorker fiction podcast, where authors perform other authors’ short stories and are interviewed about why they like what they’ve just read. A couple of months ago, I encountered Donald Bartheleme for the first time through his story Concerning the Bodyguard. This piece is experimental in a different way, narrated through a series of questions, repeating nouns where a pronoun would normally suffice. Salman Rushdie read it, lending an extra edge through his measured baritone voice.

It took until the post-reading interview before I really understood what the story was saying, although the penny might have dropped had I listened to it one more time. It’s very much snagged my interest in Bartheleme, and if I encounter his books in my travels, I will definitely place them on my reading list.

It’s a safe bet that many of us have one or two pieces that don’t conform to the accepted norms, and it can be difficult to find a suitable home for these.

One of mine is a work called The Executive Lounge which takes the form of a list of statistics describing a place, but that place only becomes clear in the last two lines. I don’t know whether to classify it as prose or poetry, as a list usually contains line breaks like a poem, but this has the metre of a prose piece.

Whichever way you consider it, it’s most definitely for the page, not performance. My only public reading of it so far was in front of an audience who are accustomed to my work, and it’s the only one of my pieces they didn’t understand until I explained it. To date it’s been rejected by several publishers. Regardless, I consider it to be a completed work in which I still have faith.

However difficult it is to find a home in a mass-market world, never be afraid to experiment. With an ever-increasing number of small publishers springing up, at least one of them is bound to be on your wavelength. The next time I identify an editor who might appreciate The Executive Lounge, I’ll send it straight to them. If nobody took a risk from time to time, we’d all be reading bland and unchallenging literature.

Incidentally, the place I read out that piece was Hotchpotch, an open-mike night for writers rather than musicians. If you live in or near Dundee, the next event is on Monday 20 October at The Burgh Coffeehouse on Commercial Street from 7pm to 9pm. Bring along your best work, experimental or not.