Echo: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen

Nassim Soleimanpour is an unusual writer who is renowned for scripting text for unrehearsed performance. Echo is a deeply personal account of his own migration journey, which is fraught with the trauma of separation, the emotional tug of war between cultures, and the desperate desire to see peace and tranquillity in his homeland. The script is unrehearsed and deliberately unprepared, and a performer is invited to deliver his often-poetic prose and the experience of transporting the self into new geographical and psychological spaces. For the performer the script acts as a guide through the journey of the playwright, who appears to be connected live from his home in Berlin. Each night a different performer transports the audience to this unique storytelling sphere where the words seem to fly off Soleimanpour’s page and are immediately mediated to the audience. The experience is visceral, and the delivery becomes somewhat transcendental.

Ben Lawson approached this theatrical challenge with humility and humour. In this play it is clear that, as a performer, you have to abandon any strategies that might ordinarily give you comfort or security to manage the demands of performing live in front of an audience. Lawson was able to surrender to this vulnerable state and give himself over to the power of the words he repeated or recited. In a way, the scenario requires the performer to empathise with Soleimanpour’s experience of uprooting his sense of self and the way in which this can destabilise you as an individual.

Echo tells us a lot about Soleimanpour, his family, his travels, his culture, his confrontations with Iranian bureaucracy, and taking Germany as his adopted home. The sentiments are extremely universal and certainly not uncommon, but the delivery in this play is particularly raw. This is achieved via the spontaneity and improvised nature of the performance. The impact of uncertainty and unpredictability on the psyche is unquestionably visible. The extremely clever video feeds and (supposed) remote connections combined with some stunning visual and lighting effects highlights the transformative aspects of the story and the performance. In this show, doors close on one sphere and open to another completely unexpected location or psychological dimension. This playful and often joyful trickery behind the imagery is frequently mesmerising. 

In this production the stage and the setting are almost completely stripped from the theatre in order to put the words and the emotions at the centre of the performance. This ingenious reversal of the theatrical order offers a new way to define and experience live performance. 

Patricia Di Risio 

Photographer: Eugene Hyland