Echo

Thursday 3rd July 2025

My first Royal Court experience. I would have thought it was interesting and experimental, except that it was another play where the actor hasn't read the script and is instructed in real time by the playwright. In this case, the playwright (Nassim Soleimanpour) was on video from his home in Berlin, where we saw the real rug, his wife and his dog. The actor was Milly Alcock, I believe, one of the few I hadn't heard of in a stellar cast. It would be mean to say we got the short straw but Toby Jones, Fiona Shaw, Adrian Leicester, Jodie Whittaker were amongst the possibilities.

This was more successful than the oak tree but still, for me, limited in its impact (so much so that, writing this - March 2026 - much later than I should have, I had to google it up before I could recall anything about it). 

There was the Persian rug - more valuable the more it is walked on - and reflections on what it is to be a migrant, particularly one that may never be able to return home (to Iran, in this case). Nassim was warm and enigmatic and his interactions with his wife were sweet, but I'm not quite sure what the "play" was, whether another actor is needed or whether this was just a talk or documentary hiding as theatre.