On a revolving stage, with just one table, one chair, and two glasses of water alongside a vial of poison powder, Nick Mohammed—a witty and reliable choice for press night who effortlessly controlled Soho Place—opened the sealed playscript of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit.
Soleimanpour, well received for his cold-read plays, wrote White Rabbit Red Rabbit when he was forbidden to leave Iran. At first sight, this play seems to be much about dictatorship, censorship, and the oppressive nature of a police state. Soleimanpour’s own life experiences certainly lend credibility to these aspects, creating a “rabbit version” of 1984 with the help of some “voluntary” audience members.
Nevertheless, deep down in its essence, the play scrutinises more profound issues such as the autonomy of authorship, the power dynamic between the pen and the voice, as well as the intricacy between the seeing (“white rabbit”) and the seen (“red rabbit”)—in short, the nature of performance. Who is present, and who is absent? Soleimanpour’s point is that, through the process of a performance, he declares his presence with the audience and the actor, through his absence. For Soleimanpour, the author is, and should always be, present.
This play also extensively explores the complexities of spectatorship and activism, which reinforces the everlasting debate about the nature of the audience. Shall we remain seated, silent “white rabbits” in the darkened auditorium, hungry for those showy, theatrical treats while demonstrating no agency, or shall we become the active, illuminating “red rabbit”, striving to make changes, not only theatrically, but hopefully in our real world as well?
It feels much like Richard Schechner’s 1970 production Commune, where an audience member needed to perform certain actions for the play to continue. This is the “red rabbit”’s responsibility. It also reminds me of another collaborative public performance, KMA’s Congregation, which conveys a similar idea through a reversed approach.
However, while all those questions are valid, they come across as a bit too pedantic, and the audience participation duplicates déjà-vus of postgraduate drama-devising exercises. Unfortunately, unlike Commune or Congregation, both maintaining their self-sufficient internal logic regardless of their theatrical presentation, White Rabbit Red Rabbit struggles to convincingly bridge the gap between its commentary on censorship and its interrogation of the nature of performance.
The play ends unconventionally, eventually using these props and attempting to add a further layer of reflection on the relationship between illusion and reality—a nod to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where Rosencrantz resentfully curses the audience to be “burned to ashes in their shoes.”
Providing a feast of celebrity performers to choose from, White Rabbit Red Rabbit leaves a question mark over the necessity of multiple encounters when the author’s ego appears so self-indulgent.
