No drama teacher ever told me this, but over time I have arrived at the conclusion that, when you’re an actor, confidence does half the job. Veteran performer Jody Kamali has plenty of it: he has a good instinct for “in the moment” acting, skillfully uses (but doesn’t abuse) audience members and, unlike some one-man shows, actually knows how to land a good joke. In Jody Kamali: This Is My Dad, he plays both himself and his father. And although role-playing is hardly an unusual tool in the genre, what sets Jody apart is the character he has chosen to investigate, and the personal way in which he chooses to go about it.
So who is this quirky, mysterious patriarch whom, Kamali suggests, nobody really knew, after all? A man who habitually stole pens from the businesses he visited; who barbecued constantly; who was boisterous, sociable and apparently genuinely fond of people; who drowned in debt; who came to Britain from Iran to study engineering; and who somehow managed to be both a communist – in love with Che Guevara – and an entrepreneur running several shady businesses because, whatever one’s political creed, “sadness is not profitable”?
Between some almost universally annoying pieces of fatherly advice “stand up straight when you walk!” and bizarre warnings “you breathe in dust while you eat”, there are both endearing eccentricities – he routinely takes his family to hospital restaurants to save money – and genuinely funny bits. The funniest are his spectacular mispronunciations of Hollywood stars: Jimmy Dean becomes James Daan, while Brando is, well, Marlon Brandy. But funniest of all is perhaps his reference to the undying Disney classic as The Hunchback of Amsterdam.
But while the role-playing works because Kamali is great with accents, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling, by the end of the play, that the show was a little too literal. This is not because the material is bad. On the contrary, this is because it holds the seeds for something more than a son’s reconstruction of his dead father. But what could have become a philosophical quest into memory and identity stays relatively close to the biographical surface, and the investigation remains, for the most part, well, just an investigation.
That is why, upon leaving the auditorium, a particularly intriguing question was still gnawing at me: how much of the father is actually in the son? Because what I felt was that, behind the eccentric anecdotes there is, ultimately, a tragic figure of Eastern masculinity here whose life was full of contradictions, and whose quirkiness was both charming and damaging. That is why, when the father tells his son toward the end of the play, “Don’t be like me,” the line lands with considerable weight. This is incredibly touching because, by the time Jody says it, we begin to suspect that perhaps the son is not only trying to understand his father, but to find out how much of him he might have actually become.
Runs until August 30 2026 | Image: Contributed
