FringeReview UK 2024
ECHO
Royal Court Theatre LI20 FT24
Genre: Adaptation, Contemporary, Cue Scripts, Devised, Improvised Theatre, Interactive, International, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, World Theatre
Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“We are whispers from the past fading into the future.” Those words confront on a screen on the Royal Court Downstairs stage. Nassim Soleimanpour’s ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) directed by Omar Elerian runs with a different unprepared actor till July 27th.
Ultimately, the most telling line ”We are all immigrants across time” defines what remains an extraordinary experience
Written by Nassim Soleimanpour, Directed by Omar Elerian, Creative Technologist & Production Designer Derek Richards,
Lighting Designer Jackie Shemesh, Composer & Sound Designer Anna Clock, Dramaturg Kirsty Housley, Dramaturg & Creative Producer Immanuel Bartz, Script Editor Stewart Pringle, Casting Director Amy Ball & Arthur Carrington
CSM Rike Berg, Stage Manager Aimee Woods, Production AV Engineer Ethan Hudson, AV Technician Operator Peter Adams, Image Director Majid Kashani, Show Technician Vicki Murphy, Sound Technician Patrick O’Sullivan
For the Royal Court
Stage Supervisor Steve Evans, Production Manager Marius Renning, Lighting Supervisor Daisy Simmons, Lighting Programmer Lizzie Skellett, Company manager Mica Taylor, Lead Producer Ralph Thiompson
Till July 27th
Review
“We are whispers from the past fading into the future.” Those words confront on a screen on the Royal Court Downstairs stage. It’s one of two, the other showing fellow audience-members arriving. Nassim Soleimanpour’s ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) directed by Omar Elerian runs with a different unprepared actor till July 27th.
If the performer knows as little as we do, then audience engagement and empathy with them is a given. It’s reminiscent of Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, but far more developed. The run starts with Fiona Shaw, continues with actors like Jody Whitaker, Monica Dolan and Jessica Gunning, to conclude with for instance Toby Jones and Emilia Clarke. Tonight Adrian Lester packs the house. It’s sold out.
For good reason. Over 80 minutes, whatever one feels about individual sections in this multi-leaved work, the overall effect is mesmerising. Featuring in this year’s LIFT Festival, ECHO continues to deliver the ‘bold” programming David Byrne promised. The question, perhaps, is what one takes away.
At first glance the piece bears uncanny resemblance to the last show in this space: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, adapted by Margaret Perry and directed by Katie Mitchell. That though was a synchronous assemblage where only backdrop material was filmed in the past. ECHO – acronym for something not truly illuminating – is a far more intricate concept.
Essentially, how do we talk to our own past, and to people across time as well as now? Especially if we’re migrants and find travelling to family so challenging, so that time lapses more profoundly, creating fissures in relating. Here, borders and checks map onto the two screens and the break or leap across each enacts a feel of travel restrictions, border, enclosure, access or lack of it.
Can we enlist others to help, and in that connection, forge bonds with them? Or perhaps deceive them with our own overwhelming need to tell a story, smooth over the disruptions and tears in space? Space too is part of this narrative: and the stars look down, with light travelling not just from their past, but the writer’s.
Lester stands on the otherwise bare stage, save for a carpet (walking on a Persian rug adds value) and a pre-recorded voice has fun asking him perfunctory screening questions. Soleimanpour then pops up from Berlin and takes Lester on a serious of virtual tours, which open doors not only on Soleimanpour’s faintly irritated partner cooking, but into Berlin, or Swedish friends (one a Strindberg descendant), complete with snowmobile; but mostly his Iranian family. Though this is in the autumn of 2022, a seismic time in Iran. You suspect quite quickly where you are.
Soleimanpour admits he has to use two passports to travel between the two countries. Inevitably by this time the storytelling has struck, and there’s consequences. There’s also the tale, for instance of an old teacher chiding Soleimanpour’s father, the brightest of his year, for not being what he should be. Which kick-start him into writing novels. With such a creative family, quotable gestures and one-liners
Lester later responds to the ear mic we’re told is there, and acts with a mesmerising dispatch, as if he’s rehearsed it. He hasn’t (with each actor rehearsed for one performance the Court would be bankrupted even if the actors had agreed). Lester’s authority – his vocal nuances remind us how fine a singer he is too – add huge credence to this quasi-improvisatory event.
Creative technologist and designer Derek Richards has crafted a nest of temporal mirrors and trompes d’oeil down rabbit-holes of autobiography, with filming and camera switches. There’s some bewitching effects later from image director Majid Kashani: one with trees shedding autumn sycamores across to another screen where nebulae spiral. It’s slanted into the sense of now with Jackie Shemesh’s lighting; and Anna Clock’s sound and composition wrapping a warm hug around what might seem detached and chilled. The back-up team is hefty.
Ultimately, the most telling line ”We are all immigrants across time” defines what remains an extraordinary experience, though one which diffuses the impact of the text with distractions and overly-self-conscious projections of the script itself.
Humour can relieve a deeply intimate moment, though it can slightly alienate too. Several have said they’d like to go again. Each actor is of course vulnerable to bemused lapses, and Lesser wryly expressed these once.
An experience that can never be condensed, yet, as Bluets shows, can sometimes best be recalled with a few images and stray lines that escape the delight of creation.
