ECHO, Royal Court Theatre Review

Reviews

18 Jul

Written by Franco Milazzo for Theatre and Tonic.

Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in return for an honest review. All opinions are our own.

Experimental theatre maker Nassim Soleimanpour has persuaded a raft of top stage and screen stars - including the MCU’s Benedict Wong, Game Of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke and ex-Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker - to take part in the follow-up to his acclaimed and subversive White Rabbit, Red Rabbit.

That Soleimanpour is a brave soul is in no doubt. As a conscientious objector, he was banned from leaving his home country of Iran and, instead, he wrote the 2012 play to be performed by an actor on a bare stage who would not see the text before setting foot on stage. The “cold read” was performed in London at the Gate theatre by (among others) Tamsin Grieg and Juliet Stevenson. In 2013, the play opened in the US with F. Murray Abraham, Whoopi Goldberg, Bobby Carnavale and others taking part.

ECHO is a sequel of sorts which asks a sole performer (on press night, Adrian Lester) to follow instructions and “cold read” a script fed to them on a computer screen or through an earpiece. All the while, Soleimanpour watches on a remote camera placed in the wings. The writer pulls all the meta-theatrical tricks in the book, folding us all - actor, audience and even the stage manager - into the worldview he has developed after moving to Berlin.

There are definite parallels with another Royal Court play that is part of David Byrne’s debut season, Bluets which featured Ben Whishaw, Emma D’Arcy and Kayla Meikle. Both made use of high-profile stars to read through text which, while being pretty on the page, never really pulls us in. In ECHO’s case, the “cold read” quickly turns into a monotone with the occasionally perplexed Lester barely given a chance to add in his years of experience while processing the words in front of him. For those who have ever sat in a GCSE English class where one of the kids is being asked to read aloud one of Shakespeare’s duller and longer soliloquies, the sensation isn’t all that different at times.

Another parallel is the use of technology. Bluets and ECHO both rely heavily on multiple screens to carry us on Soleimanpour’s journey from Iran to Berlin and back again via Scandinavia and the United States. He uses video effects aplenty to pretend we are in an interrogation, to show three versions of himself in the same room or to virtually appear on stage with Lester. Screensaver-like projections are presented while Lester talks through prose poetry which interlinks his family history, the migrant experience, the notion of “home”, carpet culture, time, space and many things in between with little connecting tissue but some nifty wordplay. At some points, it is clear that more thought has been put into the pre-recorded 2D sections than the live 3D elements.

There’s a feeling that ECHO (subtitled Every Cold Hearted Oxygen) is a pretentious rehash of his most famous earlier work, albeit with a video glow-up. Even when it moves out of the shadow of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, it has little to say that hasn’t been said many times before. Soleimanpour has a beaming smile and knows how to create distinctive theatre but his writing is obvious and smacks of sixth-form poetry in its simple and shallow observations. A play that relies this heavily on tech and replaceable actors raises a serious question about the direction of theatre itself: how long before AI is used to write, direct and perform a work like this?

Actor schedule:

13 July, 6.30pm: Fiona Shaw

15 July, 7.30pm: Benedict Wong

16 July, 7.30pm: Sheila Atim

17 July, 7.00pm: Adrian Lester

18 July, 7.30pm: Jeremy O. Harris

19 July, 7.30pm: Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem

20 July, 1.30pm: Monica Dolan

20 July, 6.30pm: Emilia Clarke

22 July, 7.30pm: Meera Syal

23 July, 7.30pm: Jodie Whittaker

24 July, 7.30pm: Mawaan Rizwan