English by Sanaz Toossi
The Other Place, Stratford Upon Avon until 1st June
May 15th 2024
Kiln Theatre, London 5th-29th June
The RSC’s third theatre space, The Other Place (TOP) started life as a tin shed rehearsal room in the 1970s, and under the command of legendary director and activist, Buzz Goodbody, it became a studio theatre space for contemporary and experimental writers. Through refurbishment, a stint as “The Courtyard Theatre” and a holding place for performances while the RST and The Swan underwent transformation during 2006-2010, The Other Place is now firmly embedded as a venue for new, exciting, contemporaneous and exploratory theatre, and it is with English that new Co-Artistic Directors, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, open this 2024 TOP season. And it is a good choice, in keeping with the principles that founded TOP in the first place.
The Pulitzer-prize winning play, written by Sanaz Toossi, sits beautifully in the flexible auditorium at TOP, as an end-on production. We are greeted by a box-set, sparsely furnished with a few chairs, a couple of tables and a frosted window and door which suggests a world outside the classroom that is the centre of this story. The story itself seems simple enough on the surface – set in a classroom in Iran, four adult learners are taking a course in English as a Foreign Language, each of them with a personal reason to want to learn.
Marjan (Nadia Albina) is the teacher, who is absolutely clear that the only way to learn English is to only speak English in the classroom, and she places an ultimately ineffective ban on any of her learners using Farsi to communicate. Her students include the enthusiastic 18 year old Goli (Sara Hazemi) who wants to open her career horizons, grandmother Roya (Lanna Joffrey) who needs to learn English so that she can speak to her granddaughter who is being raised in Canada, Omid (Nojan Khazai) who seems to be a more advanced English speaker than he lets on, and Elham (Serena Manteghi) who has already failed the course 5 times, but desperately needs the qualification in order to become a teaching assistant in Australia.
The students all begin with a different understanding of, and differing abilities in, speaking English, and this is communicated to the audience using the convention of accents. When they speak to each other in their native Farsi, they say the words in an easy, natural accent. When they attempt to speak English, it is with a very pronounced “foreign” accent, which serves very effectively to highlight the incorrect phrasing and grammar that inevitably accompanies the vocabulary. This opening of the play is light-hearted and funny, showcasing the personalities and relationships of the group as they struggle together to the same end goal.
However, it becomes clear early on that although this play focuses on a story about an English class, it is truly about identity and loss. As each learner becomes more proficient over the 6-week course, they share with each other their struggles with losing who they are, while learning something that they have all believed would open up their world.
Albina’s Marjan, who has spent 9 years living in Manchester (where she was known as Mary) embodies this perfectly. She talks of how much she enjoyed the freedom and opportunities that living in England brought to her, but cannot quite articulate why she came home. She finds herself slipping into speaking Farsi more frequently and getting some English words wrong, and it is only when she admits that “for 9 years I couldn’t make anyone laugh” that she really sees how communicating outside of her native language made her lose important parts of herself. Each of the characters follow their own story-arc, realising their self-worth, their sense of identity and ultimately their pride in who they are.
Manteghi’s harsh-seeming Elham (a really strong performance) notably softens when she dares to communicate in the classroom in Farsi, and the moment she declares “I don’t like who I am when I speak English.” is touching, powerful and revelatory, embodying the spirit of this play.
The lighting (Elliot Griggs) and sound (George Dennis) design is effective – blasts of noise which are abruptly cut off at the end of the scene transitions, are jarring and impactful, and the lighting which for the most part is the strip-light illumination of the classroom, but which also evokes the outside world and the suggestion of the film “Notting Hill” (a learning tool) is beautifully ambient.
Directed by Diyan Zora, the cast are, without exception, brilliant – each of them telling two sides of their character in harmony, and punctuating their struggles with moments of real laugh-out-loud humour.
Having English as my first (and only) language, this play opened up a new world of experiences to me: learning English as a foreign language with all of those inherent challenges notwithstanding, the experience of people who are having to work so hard to simply make themselves understood, and in that process, are having their own authentic sense of self chipped away, is something that I had never been exposed to as a concept, and I applaud this play for presenting this with humour, warmth, joy and expertise. It is a beautiful piece of storytelling, communicating an important and urgent narrative, which never feels moralistic or preachy. Wittgenstein’s famous quote “the limits of my language means the limits of my world” takes on a different meaning, I think, in reference to this play.
English is a really strong opener for the TOP 2024 season, and at 90 minutes, a pacy and complete show, that leaves the audience with both questions and answers.
