
Photo credit Chris Payne
Written by Javaad Alipoor with Chris Thorpe
Directed by Javaad Alipoor
HOME
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is the final piece of a trilogy that follows on from two Fringe First winners, The Believers Are But Brothers and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran. Any concerns regarding that tricky “third” album are quickly dissipated as Javaad Alipoor introduces the subject matter for the next 90 minutes. This is a whip-smart journey that delves into the unsolved murder of ’70s Iranian pop icon Fereydoun Farrokhzad via murder mystery podcasts and an exploration of digital culture and post colonial theory. This new production expands on themes from the previous works looking at how technology, resentments and fracturing identities are changing our world.
Alipoor sends his audience down Internet rabbit holes where we ride the hyperlinks and visit the land of Wikipedia where not everything is as it seems and via a live murder mystery podcast we emerge as seasoned supersleuths face to face with a real life Persian musical superstar. An actual flesh and blood man with a Wikipedia page who steps onstage mindfully aware that someone in this audience tonight might actually be there to assassinate him. This is a production that is fast moving and demands the rapt attention of its audience; anything less and you risk being cast adrift in Tehran, Vancouver or the lowlands of Scotland.
The staging is deceptively simple with an all black set and a lecturn but as with the Internet and cross cultural experience nothing is quite as it seems. Screens move from side to side and sets appear to open like in an advent calendar…this is multi cultural, multi layered and multi dimensional experience that invites the audience to look at the big picture in all its elements and shades. Live action as King Raam and Me-Lee Hay make music in a studio, blurred newspaper images, colour TV film footage, Alipoor at his lecturn, Asha Read delivering a podcast, Wikipedia pages floating over screens…like translucent layers of onion being peeled back…its heady stuff that you can’t not breathe in and may leave a tear in your eye.

In the ’70s a beloved Persian music icon, by the ’80s Farrokhzad was a political refugee in Germany working in a grocery store and just 6 months before his brutal and unsolved murder in 1992 he sold out two nights at The Royal Albert Hall. That’s quite a story…imagine if something similar had happened to our national treasure Tom Jones! Shocking, sad and tragic but in the past. Yet it really isn’t when a death remains stubbornly unsolved and theatre makers like British/Iranian Javaad Alipoor make us click those hyperlinks. It really isn’t when Raam Emami speaks of his experience as a Canadian/Iranian musician whose work is both celebrated and castigated in Iran. It really isn’t when he tells you about his father Kavous-Seyed-Emami, a lecturer, tortured and murdered in Tehran…though Wikipedia says he committed suicide while on detention. It really isn’t when Raam Emami or King Raam is on a death list discovered by the FBI.
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is one of those really great pieces of theatre that makes you think, it provokes and it informs but it does so without being earnest or preachy. This is the kind of theatre we need more off so click on the hyperlink below and book your ticket now!!