Echo at Royal Court Theatre. Photo by Manuel Harlan.To begin with, perhaps it would be fairer to highlight what goes right, for a very great deal of this amalgamation of poetry, imagery, camera work, staging, story-telling, metaphysical time-travel, and scene recreation is clever and worthy in its origination and ideas. On press night, the redoubtable performer of both modern and classical texts Adrian Lester acted as our go between, while the playwright connected to a large screen on stage via laptop from his adopted home in Berlin where he and his wife (and dog Echo) now live. Having left Iran — possibly never to return due to his texts posing a challenge to the authoritarian regime, he finds himself anchor-less and rudderless in a world whose timelines and environments are riddled with incongruities and consequentially laced with sadness.
What starts as a curious and interesting premise - part performance art underpinned by a very real and impactful geopolitical culture clash, somewhat loses its own thread and gets bogged down chasing the author’s existence through the seasons. At one point we’re treated to a skidoo ride across a frozen lake which ends with the playwright receiving a friendship bracelet from a young girl. It serves only as a slightly odd (even a little creepy) interlude, but the whole is wrapped-up as some sort of grand and insightful message about life, love, time and the universe, which in reality never quite translates and on occasions veers precariously close to pretentiousness.
Once again, it is refreshing and exciting that the Royal Court and its new team, are intent on encouraging and making space for creatives who choose to work in more avant-garde performance formats. As with the recent Bluets, not all will be entirely successful in their execution, irrespective of the talents involved and everyone’s best efforts, but honing such ideas and giving them space to breathe and exist, is what theatre should be about.
