You think you know what to expect from theatre, and then you watch Nassim Soleimanpour’s gripping stage experiment, White Rabbit Red Rabbit!
The premise itself is a deceptively simple one. At every performance, a different actor must bring to life a script that they’re seeing on the Duchess Theatre stage for the very first time. What follows is a deeply personal, allegorical experience, bridging the gap between the audience, the actor, and Soleimanpour in 2010 when he wrote the play, completely unsure of his future and unable to leave Iran.
On this particular opening night, it was Lucian Msamati who bravely took on the task, accompanied only by a script in an unassuming brown envelope, a stepladder, a table with two glasses of water, and a surprise he’d been given. As an experiment, White Rabbit Red Rabbit depended heavily on the commitment and dramaturgical dexterity of the evening’s leading man, and it was a pleasure to watch Msamati more than deliver.
Despite knowing as little as the audience, who hung onto his every breath, Msamati was deeply charming and thoroughly engaging, processing and executing Soleimanpour’s words in real time with the utmost respect and professionalism. Msamati proved to be a perfect vessel for the writer’s musings, as well as his longing for freedom and connection through space and time. The veteran actor approached the unknown with humour and authority that kept the audience onside, while lending an assured gravitas as the heavier themes and motivations of the experiment became more and more evident.
With all that being said, Msamati’s performance could only work in partnership with a script that was carefully plotted, well thought through, and able to give the actor the best chance of success, and Soleimanpour largely succeeded at this. While some of the allegories worked better than others, White Rabbit Red Rabbit worked best when at its most vulnerable. There were many moments of genuine tenderness as Msamati effectively brought the Duchess Theatre audience into his worldview, as if being dropped into his personal diary.
The set pieces and moments of audience participation served as clever meta-commentary, deftly playing with the social contract of theatre to communicate the complicity in silent spectatorship and the suppression of individuality in favour of crabs-in-a-barrel complicity. Although this was largely executed successfully, some moments felt somewhat tonally jarring and, as one could expect in an experiment as personal as this, some ideas weren’t as coherent or efficiently presented as they could have been, leading to the occasional breaking of suspension of disbelief, but rescued by Msamati’s know-how.
All in all, White Rabbit Red Rabbit is a deeply moving and, at times, thrilling theatrical experiment. While a project that so readily plays with the conventions of theatre may be difficult to wrap one’s head around at first, the mere fact that we were able to be so engaged in Soleimanpour’s point of view and united in empathy for his artistic dream means that the writer, aided by a magnificent actor, more than succeeded on his own terms.
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