Edinburgh Fringe 2023
Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World
Javaad Alipoor Company
Genre: Drama, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Traverse
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
An investigation into the nature of investigation itself.
Things Happen takes the form of an investigation into the still unsolved murder of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, Farrkzhad was a 1970s Iranian pop star and cultural phenomenon, hosting one of Iran’s first TV variety shows, the Silver Carnation. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, he was forced into exile in Germany, and in 1992 while living there as a refugee, was found in his flat brutally murdered; neighbours said they had heard his dog barking for two nights.
Javaad Alipoor exposes how “The tools we use trick us into thinking that our fragmented world can be drawn together. But it can’t. We can’t make the invisible visible in that way. But we can choose to believe it’s out there”
Review
From the beginning of Javaad Alipoor’s fabulous new play, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, we are led down a series of interlinked rabbit holes, finding tenuous connections between things, swirling us through an increasingly frenetic kaleidoscope of ideas.
“ ‘Down the rabbit hole’ – refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange… introduced… as the title for a chapter of the 1865 novel, Alice in Wonderland”, Wikipedia. And from that beginning, nowadays ‘down the rabbit hole’ is often used to describe someone who gets lost surfing the internet.
And so it is that we find ourselves burrowing away through interlinked rabbit holes in the latest in Javaad Alipoor’s trilogy of plays examining how technology and identity interplay and impact upon each other. After The Believers Are But Brothers and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, Alipoor and Thorpe’s new play, Things Hidden Since The Beginning of The World, takes on the internet itself, looking at how while seemingly giving us access to a vast pool of knowledge it simultaneously curates and distorts the information we receive.
Things Happen takes the form of an investigation into the still unsolved murder of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, Farrkzhad was a 1970s Iranian pop star and cultural phenomenon, hosting one of Iran’s first TV variety shows, the Silver Carnation. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, he was forced into exile in Germany, and in 1992 while living there as a refugee, was found in his flat brutally murdered; neighbours said they had heard his dog barking for two nights.
Alipoor tells us Farrokhzad was referred to as the Iranian Tom Jones, except of course, he wasn’t the Iranian Tom Jones. He was the Iranian Fereydoun Farrokhzad, and only the Iranian Tom Jones in the Orientalist renaming the majority global north employs to situate everything within its own ambit. Neocolonialism and where power aligns with who controls information is very much at the heart of Things Happen.
In its investigation of Farrokhzad’s murder Things Happen uses and deconstructs a mish mash of forms employing informal storytelling, a murder mystery podcast, video projection and journeys down the rabbit hole that is the internet. How we tell a story matters and impacts on how we perceive its truth. Just as the internet tries to persuade us that there is a universal truth out there if only we can get enough information, so Things Happen mimics the overload of the internet to explode its promise of a false universalism. It implodes the illusion of the possibility of information as a neutral commodity, revealing how much the internet is mediated to control the information we receive while retaining the power structures of neo colonialism.
Increasingly the repetition of the podcast’s motif “The More You Know, The More You Understand” becomes the Big Brother anthem of a false truth.
Scintillatingly written by Alipoor and Thorpe, the play is slippery and difficult to grasp, a torrent of words and ideas that never allows us to settle. As the play hurtles towards its end, ideas come at you thick and fast rewiring your neural pathways in real time: you’ll never unquestionably trust information as benignly neutral again.
The play is a boisterous mash up of forms and accordingly the performers use different methods to tell their part of the story. Javaad introduces the play as storyteller, his gentle presence allowing us to trust the narrative. Raam Emami plays the part of the son of an Iranian dissident in a straightforward but compelling manner while Asha Reid’s podcast performer takes a more heightened parody performance. Together with music from Raam Emami and Me-Lee Hay, the performances elevate the pace and complexity of the text.
Given this is a play about the impact of technology, you would expect it to be techie and you wouldn’t be disappointed – the technology in Things Hidden is quite simply stunning and totally integral to the show. Its set of opaque sliding screens and platforms behind screens fuel the tensions between what is real and what is not; as the pace heightens towards the end of the show we becme increasingly unsure about what we’re seeing – what is projection and what is actually before us on stage. As the play moves into information overload that the audience is bombarded with random web pages flying towards them, followed by these disintegrating into circuit boards and chips. Limbic Cinema’s video projection is stunning.
This is a dazzling play of ideas but is far from a cerebral experience using disruption of form, performance and technology to explode into a pyrotechnic display of intellectual stimulation.
