White Rabbit Red Rabbit – @sohoplace, London

Writer: Nassim Soleimanpour

It is a play that cannot be described and that, for performer and audience, must remain a surprise. Almost nothing about the content, style or approach has been disclosed since writer Nassim Soleimanpour completed it in 2010. White Rabbit Red Rabbit is known as a “cold-read” play, meaning that at every performance, a new actor encounters it for the first and only time and, for the next 55-65 minutes, learns about its contents along with the audience. Revived at @sohoplace with 46 different actors given a single shot, the show’s Press and Opening Night reader is Nick Mohammed.

Arriving onstage, the actor is presented with only a chair, two glasses of water and an envelope containing Soleimanpour’s script, itself a non-traditional series of instructions, philosophical and personal reflections and an allegory – that of the white and red rabbit – making points about the looped self-fulfilling connection between past and future. The performers’ job – in this case the sometimes-bemused Mohammed – is to deliver the writer’s words in what becomes equal parts experiment and theatrical deconstruction of playwriting, acting and viewing.

One of White Rabbit Red Rabbit’s most interesting debates centres on this reflection on the power of authorial voice, and Soleimanpour frequently pushes both the actor and what he refers to as ‘my audience’ to reflect on where power lies in the auditorium. Acknowledging that he speaks to a room somewhere, sometime in the future, who has authority to act hangs over the @sohoplace stage; is it the writer providing the words and constructing the action, controlling behaviours and responses from afar (writing in Iran in 2010) or the people present each night, the actor included? Do we adhere to convention and let the action play out, becoming complicit witnesses, or can the actor or the audience intervene, a decision Soleimanpour leaves to everyone in the room to make for themselves, even the one with the script?

These parts of the performance, as well as the exploration of the meeting point between writer, actor and viewer, and the intermediary role the actor plays, are the most engaging, perhaps more so than the jaunty tests and scenarios performed with selected audience members, and these leave big open questions. By the time you read this, the consequences of Mohammed’s experience will be known, either because something has happened or, perhaps more insightfully, because nothing has.

Here and there, the text betrays its age, asking the actor at one point if they are a ‘boy’ or ‘girl,’ a simplistic gendering that could use an update, while Mohammed clearly wags a disapproving finger when instructed to refer to an audience member as ‘sweetheart.’ Viewers should also note there is brief reference to suicide, which doesn’t appear in the trigger warnings

Mohammed is game, however, by reading out and enacting Soleimanpour’s instructions. This is not an experience that has characters exactly or traits that the performer must convey, but instead, they simultaneously become a master of ceremonies, the puppet of and a mouthpiece for a writer 14 years and many thousands of miles away. From classical actors like Michael Sheen and Jonathan Pryce to rising stars Daisy Edgar Jones and Ambika Mod, even a screen legend, Stockard Channing, will any of the 45 other actors play it any differently? You’ll have to go again to find out.

Runs until9 November 2024