English

Sanaz Toossi’s play takes place in Iran in a classroom for four students of English as a foreign language, the different sessions amusingly signalled by changes in the room’s wall clock.

The students, with different motives, are preparing to leap various hurdles necessitating that they pass a Test of English as a Foreign Language.  Their teacher, Marjan (Salme Geransar), is also attempting to prepare them for life in a foreign country.  And it is partly for this reason that she insists that in the classroom they always speak English rather than Farsi.  The actors represented spoken English by accenting it and spoken Farsi by using unaccented English.

The challenges, tensions, reluctant cooperation, and mutual teasing between the students fostered many humorous moments.  Some of these arose through understandable difficulties with peculiarities of English, which aren’t laboured.  Eventually we learned of other difficulties too, including most characters’ secret longings and fears, along with hints of unspoken ones.  The difficulty that was plainest, though, was that of the shifting sense of identity and belonging that comes of thinking with and eventually in another language.  Marjan conducted the class as a cooperative exercise, but conflicts and resentments inevitably arose, and Marjan struggled imperfectly to resolve them, heightening her own personal (and mysterious) difficulties.

This talented cast, in the hands of director Tasnim Hossain, made the ordinary and the extraordinary Iranian experience credible to us of the West, gesture and voice pitched just so and generally well articulated, drawing us into the difficulties and the hopes and dreams of four students and a teacher breaching the barriers to successful communication in a language that feels unnatural to them all.

For those of us at least who have grown up in western traditions, this is a production with quiet rewards in terms of insights into becoming strangers to everyone, including perhaps ourselves.

John P. Harvey.

Images: Top: [L–R] Salme Geransar, Marjan Mesbahi, Delaram Ahmadi, Osamah Sami, and Maia Abbas, in English.  Lower: Osamah Sami and Delaram Ahmadi, in English.  Photographer: John P. Harvey.