Writer: Sanaz Toossi
Director: Diyan Zora
We’re in a classroom in Iran where four adult students are working to master English as a foreign language. 
Their teacher has one rule, a rule she writes on the whiteboard: “English Only”. As she says, “In this room, we are native speakers. We think in English. We laugh in English. Our inhales, our exhales – we fill our lungs in English.”
This is the European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English, and it’s a tale of aspirations and disappointments told with pathos and humour. As the piece progresses we start to learn about the people in the room, though some of their stories raise more questions than they give answers.
Teacher Marjan (Nadia Albina) has returned to Iran after living in Manchester for nine years. She tells us it’s because she got tired though you can’t help but feel there’s a deeper story here that she won’t discuss, as she immerses herself in English rom-com movies. Omid (Nojan Khazai) already speaks very good English, better than Marjan, so why is he there? Roya (Lanna Joffrey) is planning to live with her son and see her granddaughter in Canada, Elham (Serena Manteghi) has been offered a conditional place at medical school in Australia but she must master the language before she can take it up, and Goli (Sara Hazemi) tells us that English makes her feel like a different person, taller and more visible.
Toossi’s script and the portrayals of the characters create a believable scenario, where the characters talk in fluent unaccented English when speaking Farsi compared to their halting, heavily accented dialogue in English. Anyone who’s tried to learn a second language as an adult will be able to relate – we have all the frustrations at being unable to express nuances of ideas in the target language, the desire to become fluent and accentless alongside the accidental comedy when a word is badly chosen or incorrectly pronounced. Then as the weeks go on the evolving classroom dynamics, differing abilities and changing relationships create tensions.
Albina’s Marjan has a delicately observed sadness, a feeling of unresolved grief that we don’t ever get to understand, and Joffrey’s Roya faces her heartbreak with dignity. Hazemi gives Goli the bubbly enthusiasm of youth alongside a reluctance to put herself forward, while Khazai presents Omid as a smiling yet suspiciously predatory Omid, partly because everyone is wondering why he’s there at all. Then there’s Elham, delivered by Manteghi with all the frustrations of knowing you’re struggling yet with so much riding on success, fighting against the need to master the language and anger that it’s necessary. As she says “I have this amazing dream sometimes that the Persian Empire kept growing…. Instead of the Americans, the British, everyone telling us what to speak and how to say it, all of us would speak Farsi.”
It’s a cleverly devised and engrossing piece which allows the cast to show how they become different people in the different languages, how language can be a gateway or a prison, a saviour or an oppressor – and the final few lines serve as a reminder of what we stand to gain or lose.
Runs until 1 June 2024 then at the Kiln Theatre London from 5 – 29 June 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Sensitively portrayed and engrossing
