Theatre review: English

Marking both one of the last shows from Indhu Rubasingham at the Kiln, and one of the first from the Harvey/Evans regime at the RSC, this co-production of Sanaz Toossi's English is a great reflection on both companies. A play about language and identity, this was the 2023 Pulitzer winner for drama, and marks another year to buck the trend of underwhelming winners of that prize. Some while ago Marjan (Nadia Albina) spent nine years living in Manchester, before returning to her native Iran. She's married and settled now, but is constantly trying to reconnect with how she felt then, which she does by teaching English classes. Over a five-week course she helps four adults prepare for their TOEFL exam in a classroom she optimistically announces will be a Farsi-free zone (the fact that the play uses the conceit of the actors speaking English in Iranian accents, with "Farsi" represented by English in their own accents, tells you how successful they are at sticking to this.)

18-year-old Goli (Sara Hazemi) is the closest to matching the teacher's enthusiasm for the language - in Farsi she feels pressured for everything to sound poetic, but learning English makes her feel freer.

The others have more concrete and pressing reasons for needing a passing score though - Elham (Serena Manteghi) is a promising scientist, but her heavy accent and poor results in past attempts are keeping her back from the medical postgrad she needs to do in Australia to further her career. Roya (Lanna Joffrey) has the visa to move to Canada with her son, but he's told her she can't do it until she can speak to her granddaughter exclusively in English.

The play deals, inevitably, with the way the English language has been used by Britain and America as a form of colonialism, with the five characters representing a spectrum of responses to how it relates to their identity, from Marjan essentially wishing she could be fully integrated in the West, to Elham's open hostility to the language itself. But setting it in Iran inevitably adds a further dimension that makes us invest in the characters and feel concerned for them: Omid (Nojan Khazai) is by far the most advanced, but needs to be perfect because it's harder for men to get visas than women. But as it soon becomes apparent his English is significantly better than the teacher's, you start to question exactly what he's doing in this room.

Ultimately Toossi appears to be less concerned with the heavy politics we might expect from a play set in Iran, and more with showing us a more day-to-day reality of life there. There's definitely a sense that having a way out is always a good thing but no specifics about why, and instead of the wider politics of Western interference in the Middle East we get the impression that the real tragedy here is that actions from both inside and outside the country have made it hard for the characters to connect to their national culture in the way they want to.

This isn't an event-heavy play: Marjan develops a pretty obvious crush on Omid (because she's got eyes, good lord; but also because his English skills are obviously her personal kryptonite) and Roya heartbreakingly puts together the real reason her son has set such a high requirement on her being allowed to go to Canada. But this is a character piece that stays closely on-theme to their relationships to language and identity while giving each of them a distinct personality and journey. And Diyan Zora's preoduction helps make the gentle 90 minutes feel packed with incident, comedy and drama: This is a quietly gorgeous piece of theatre that ticks all the boxes it sets out to.

English by Sanaz Toossi is booking until the 6th of July at the Kiln Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Richard Davenport.