White Rabbit Red Rabbit is an interesting experiment, but it’s difficult to pin down precisely what - if anything - can be learnt from it.
Writer Nassim Soleimanpour is unable to leave his native Iran. Passports are dependent upon first completing two years National Service, and Nassim is a conscientious objector. So he wrote a play that would travel the world in his place, speaking his thoughts and voicing his words in a kind of slightly eerie omnipresent absence.
The script for White Rabbit Red Rabbit is never performed by the same actor twice and so no two performances can ever be quite the same. On Thursday night at the Traverse, it was the turn of Scottish actress Siobhan Redmond to read the play for the first time – without ever having seen the script before and therefore with no idea what it may demand of her.
Rather dramatically, the script was brought on stage in a sealed envelope and opened live in front of the audience. Redmond first apologised for wearing glasses, explaining that she couldn’t read without them, but assuring us that we could just shout if we felt that they shut us out and she would drag them down to the end of her nose. This was all a very informal and inclusive affair, in which the audience were as much involved in the action as the actor.
To say too much about what followed would completely ruin the performances to come. Suffice to say, themes of obedience and conformity, tangential contemplation of how traditions and cultures are formed, possibilities, limitations and suicide were all touched upon in some form or other. Quite where this all left us in the end was somewhat confused – but that is rather beside the point. There was no particular message in Nassim’s vicariously transmitted bottle, the point being that he exercised his right to speak, and flaunted the fact that in today’s world of multi-social-media there are a variety of ways to be heard – no matter who might be trying to shut you up.
To say more may give something away, and the joy of this experiment lies solely in its unexpected nature. Friday night, funny-man Phill Jupitus will take the floor, followed by Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner on Saturday. Worth giving it a go just for the hell of it – which is probably what Soleimanpour thought when he wrote it!