White Rabbit, Red Rabbit at Soho Place

No rehearsal, no director, a different actor every night and a script waiting in a sealed envelope on stage. A soliloquy of possibility, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, much like its tongue-twister title, forces audiences to pay attention in order to fully understand the multitude of conversations it starts.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, the internationally acclaimed work by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, transforms nightly as each performer interprets the script anew. This bold theatrical venture blends humour and poignancy, offering audiences a journey into the unexpected. Featuring a rotating cast of the UK’s top talent, each giving a single, unrepeatable performance, the show promises an experience that keeps viewers riveted throughout. Cast highlights include Nick Mohammed, Michael Sheen, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jason Isaacs, Jonathan Pryce, Richard Gadd, Alan Davies, Sally Phillips, Catherine Tate, and many more.

Writer Soleimanpour, tethered to his homeland’s borders, crafted a daring and innovative work that captures the essence of his generation’s experience. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit transcends its Iranian roots, offering a profound exploration of power structures that resonates globally.

The play surpasses time and place as the author recognises his authority on stage through written scripture, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the limits of words trapped on the page. The text therefore becomes a means of travel and escapism for the playwright, an experience he invites the audience into as they’re instructed to close their eyes and imagine a scene, guided by his voice which is embodied by the actor. Since its premiere in 2011 in Edinburgh and the SummerWorks festival, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has been translated into more than 30 different languages and been performed over 3,000 times around the world, taking Soleimanpour with it.

The play rides on a lighthearted tone, yet touches graphically on dark topics such as suicide. Questioning social responsibility, the script felt personal yet deeply relatable. A self-proclaimed social experiment, the play also explores conformity and the dangers and nonsense of tradition. In this way, Soleimanpour successfully establishes a line of connection with and between the audience in the moment, but also across countries and generations as the performance is delivered to a new audience, in a different country, at a different point in history each time. 

Although delivered very well, theatregoers seemed desperate to see Mohammed play with the script further and stretch it to its limitations in some way. In the same breadth, being bound by script meant Soleimanpour was undoubtedly the main character in his own play, which is perhaps more fitting for an author searching for a kind of immortality delivered through the stage.

Balancing on the “what if”, the production is undoubtedly a unique one, and demands another reading of Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a real “thinker” and will be having you pulling at the different thematic threads, which stitch this patchwork play together.

Olivia Gardener
Image: @sohoplace

White Rabbit Red Rabbit is at Soho Place from 1^st October until 9^th November 2024. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.