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.)

Theatre review: I Call My Brothers

Once again theatre feels like the medium responding the fastest to worrying trends around the world, with a Swedish play touching on the rise of a far-right party to power in that country, but more so on the way this sentiment trickles down to the man on the street. In Jonas Hassen Khemiri's I Call My Brothers, that man is Amor (Richard Sumitro,) an Asian man in his twenties who's out clubbing on a Saturday night when a car bomb, soon to be attributed to an Islamic terrorist, goes off in downtown Stockholm. We follow Amor over the next 24 hours as he goes into town to do chores, chatting to friends and family members on the phone. The more the day goes on the more he feels targeted and under suspicion by the police and the public, but whether he's really being looked at differently or is imagining it might be up for debate.