English – Kiln Theatre, London

Writer: Sanaz Toossi

Director: Diyan Zora

Language is more than a communication tool, more than a transactional exchange to address basic needs, and in Sanaz Toossi’s 90-minute play English, her five characters in an Iranian TOEFL class learn far more about identity, culture and the feeling of clear expression in their six-week course than they ever anticipated. A sharply written comedy staged at the Kiln Theatre in association with the RSC, English debates how language becomes the basis of definition as much as a place to hide.

Students Goli, Roya, Omid and Elham meet several times a week to learn English from tutor Marjan who returned to Iran after 9-years in Manchester. Variously struggling to master the complexities of the task ahead, each class member reveals their reason for needing fluency in another language all the while reflecting on what their native Farsi means to them. With a potentially life-changing English test at the end of the course, even teacher Marjan finds her certainty challenged.

Toossi’s play is foremost a deeply empathetic exploration of five very different people whose experiences shift across their time together. From Roya keen to prove to her distant son that she can speak English well enough to interact with her granddaughter in Canada, Omid and Marjan feeling a spark as their tentative bond grows more intense or the frustrated Elham whose intellect and medical brilliance refuses to express itself in English, Toossi writes scenarios that are credibly small-scale and personal but intersect with bigger themes about self-possession, confidence and cultural ownership – as Goli pointedly explains she feels listened to in English but not in Farsi.

English is structured around a series of exercises in which Marjan uses role play, games, show and tell, and listening tasks that create different opportunities for tensions, hopes and dramas to emerge, while the actors employ accents when their characters are speaking stuttering and, later, more fluid, English but use their own speech pattern to indicate Farsi which works effectively, and these technical transitions are often a source of comedy. Most importantly, Toossi doesn’t feel obliged to run all five stories to the end of the show, knowing just the right moment when a character arc is spent and they bow out – a brave and skilful thing to do in a short drama.

A strong ensemble piece that perhaps neglects Sara Hazemi’s Goli and Lanna Joffrey’s Roya – two characters not given equal weight in the drama – Nadia Albina’s Marjan becomes increasingly affected by her students and finds her love of English-speaking culture faltering. Serena Manteghi’s Elham is also a character the audience learns to care for as her harder exterior reveals fear and a lack of confidence that shifts with time depending on whichever language she speaks, while Nojan Khazai’s Omid is more affected by his heritage than he imagines despite being top of the class.

There is a period element to English, iPhones are fairly new and the students use DVDs and CDs to talk about their favourite cultural products giving this RSC transfer a nostalgic feeling – explaining why this very human story takes place in a classroom rather than on language apps. Here they can have these conflicted ideas about what it means to speak English as a second language, how it changes or dilutes their identity, and why none of them truly feels like their real selves when they do.

Runs until29 June 2024