Tag: Dan Balfour

My English Persian Kitchen by Hannah Khalil, Soho Theatre, 30 September 2024

This show is an excellent and unusual experience in the theatre. Based on a true story, Isabella Nefar is superb as a young woman who escapes to England from an abusive marriage in Iran. She doesn’t find London life easy either, but takes solace in cooking Persian food to remind herself of the home she might never see again.

While telling her gruelling story, she also cooks Ash-e Reshteh; Persian noodle and herb soup, which after the show she serves to anyone in the audience who fancies it…which was almost everyone.

Aware that the play was this kind of thing, we got to the Soho Theatre a little early to try to get front seats. We knew that the visibility would be fine just about anywhere, but the smells would be subject to the inverse-square law and we wanted to smell this play.

We ran into a couple of people we knew while queuing: Sara Amini, whom we had met in Stratford when we attended a talk about the play Englsh in May:

English by Sanaz Toossi, The Other Place, 13 May 2024

…and also our friend Jacquie from the Boston Manor tennis courts, which was a little more of a surprise in this context.

Anyway, we got the front row seats we fancied and were entranced by the short show.

Unusually for us, we ventured to the theatre by tube rather than car, as Soho is such a awkward place for driving. A points failure near North Acton confounded us, sending our West Acton bound tube to Hanger Lane instead, making our return journey a little fraught. Fortunately we’d had a bowl of soup to sustain us and hadn’t left our dinner cooking at home when we went out!

Contemplating the yummy soup, not the journey home

This show previewed at Soho before a very well-received Edinburgh run and then a short reprise at Soho. It was very well received by the formal reviewers – click here for plenty of links.

Hopefully My English Persian Kitchen will be revived elsewhere, so that more people can get to see it, smell it and eat it.

Wilderness by Kellie Smith, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 23 March 2019

We saw the third preview of this excellent play/production at the Hampstead Downstairs.

A link to Hampstead’s information on this piece can be found through this link or the picture below:

Wilderness is about a couple who split up, determined to make it amicable for the sake of their eight-year-old son. But of course it doesn’t work out like that.

Janie and I found this play a painfully visceral piece. Neither Janie nor I have direct experience of this scenario, but that didn’t lessen the power of the drama for us.

Anna Ledwich, who has directed so many of the excellent things we’ve seen at the Hampstead, has again done brilliant work with a new writer, Kellie Smith and a superb cast: Richard Frame, Natalie Klamar, Allison Mckenzie, Finlay Robertson.

An excellent, sparse set by Lucy Sierra added to the sense of cold and decay that pervaded the piece.

One element of the writing that I think deserves praise was how very irritating the main characters were, yet Kellie Smith managed to maintain a sense of goodness and vulnerability, such that we as audience members cared about them and cared what happened to them. One of the ways she did that was to prevent us from ever seeing the child at the centre of the tussle; of course we couldn’t but care deeply for the ever-absent child and the impact the play’s events must have been having on him.

One other event will stick long in our memories. Next to us sat two slightly unusual women; one young, one quite a bit older. They clearly weren’t together but struck up a chatting friendship. At the end of the interval, the younger woman came back with some wine and cake. She plonked the wine down in front of her (we were in the front row) and commenced with munching the cake, taking and expressing great joy in her victuals.

Janie and I both, silently, thought that wine cup was an accident waiting to happen, positioned, as it was, in the path of any late-comer who might be moving swiftly to their seat at the end of the interval. Within a minute, indeed such a latecomer arrived and indeed the cup and the wine were put asunder. To make matters worse, in her dismay and forward lunge in a vain attempt to rescue her wine, the young woman also dropped the remains of her cake.

“Oh no”, said the young woman, “that was entirely my own fault”.

In some ways, that silly incident felt like a comedic metaphor for the serious subject matter of the play. Meanwhile, I have been trying to work out if I can find yet sillier places to leave victuals and crockery lying around the house in order to maximise the chance that they get spilt and/or broken. Thought experiment only, you understand.

But back to this truly excellent play/production, Wilderness. It really is well worth seeing if you like your drama intense, up close and personal.

Plenty of seats still available at the time of writing; Janie and I would suggest that you book early to avoid disappointment. The production runs to 27 April 2019 and I hope it gets a deserved transfer after that.

If or when Wilderness gets formal reviews, this link should find them.