Writer: Sara Amini
Directors: Sara Amini and Manuel Lavandera
Music is a creative and emotional outlet in all sorts of ways. For the monologuist at the heart of Sara Amini’s Saria Callas, that is especially true. As a young girl growing up in Iran, she and her school friends would bond in song, from Western pop influences to classical music to Iranian popular music and songs of revolution.
But despite her love of singing, the young Sara grows up in a place where it is forbidden for women to sing in public. And so the journey to womanhood is a combination of natural feelings and navigation of a culture that has very definite ideas of who can do what.
Amini’s story as she grows up is peppered with lipsyncs and vocal performances, from Iranian performers Googoosh and Fataneh to operatic numbers from Bizet and Schubert, and everything in between. Amini’s vocal performance is strongest in her operatic register, with a performance of Madonna’s Like a Virgin that feels underpowered in comparison.
A straightforward linear story told in this manner would be entertaining on its own. But Amini alternates the time periods in her storytelling, flipping from this tale of her own personal development with a later period where she, as a single mother, brings up a child who gleefully resists any attempts to place them in a gender-based pigeonhole.
This dual timeline narrative allows us to see why and how a mother who has spent her life finding ways to resist and reject the confines of what she, as a woman, can do, then goes on to handle a child who is sashaying the path she once tentatively walked.
Some of the descriptions of her child’s journey feel incredibly familiar. The family wedding where Sara’s stern father is disgusted by his grandchild’s effeminate dancing brings the clash to a height, as the mother is called upon to navigate a path between her father’s austere demands and the desire for freedom that her child inherited.
It is also this second story that frustrates, as the focus on the mother’s perspective grants us too little of her child’s point of view. As the play nears the end of its hour, we see Sara being given an ultimatum of whether to support the child she knew as a son transitioning to a daughter.
We end with question marks over both how her child arrived at the state where they need to make that demand, and what happened next. Saria Callas revels in the latter question mark, asking how a woman who has lived her life wanting more than the role her society imposed upon women should now react to her child becoming a daughter.
It is how that question should get answered that feels like the heart of the show. And yet it is missing. Saria Callas offers a unique, often joyful, insight into an Iranian woman’s life. However, it is the story that continues after the lights have come down that is the one that really matters.
Continues until 17 May 2025
The Reviews Hub Score
Joyful but incomplete
