According to Wikipedia, Fereydoun Farrokhzad was an Iranian pop sensation who, between 1962 and 1992, was a household name in his home country. His life as a TV star, showman and sex symbol saw him sell out a series of multiple shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
As a political activist not shy of speaking out against the Islamic government following the 1979 revolution, Farrokhzad was forced into exile, and latterly lived in Bonn, Germany. It was here his body was found in his apartment in 1992, having been stabbed repeatedly in the face and upper torso. While his killing was widely believed by many to have been sanctioned by the Islamic government, his murder has never been solved.
This is the starting point for Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Javaad Alipoor’s latest exploration of the relationship between real life and the digital world. Jumping down assorted online rabbit holes, Alipoor takes in Iranian pop music and the murder mystery podcast boom in a show one reviewer has likened to ‘the wikification of the human psyche’.
“Part of the show is about pop music and pop culture,” Alipoor explains. “There's a lot of music in it, with a lot of video and images of this incredible kind of psychedelic period of the Middle East in the seventies, when the music from that period was amazing. At the same time, it's also about this really contemporary, really difficult political stuff.”
In this way, the play demonstrates the power of pop music in terms of artists speaking out against forces of oppression, as well as the dangers inherent in taking a stand in such regimes.
“If it was the regime that the Iranian regime that killed Farrokhzad, that's not a story of the past,” Alipoor points out. “That's the story of the beginning of now. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, if you fled a dictatorship and you came to the democratic countries of the West, you had safety there. But actually from the 1990s onwards, that's got worse and worse. If you're fleeing Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, China, their arm will still get you.
“We know about the network of secret police stations that the Chinese Communist Party were running in the UK, and there are currently fifteen Iranian journalists and artists in this country who have credible threats to their lives, according to the Metropolitan Police. All of that is probably at the heart of the show.”
Written with Chris Thorpe, and presented by Alipoor’s own company, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is the final part of a trilogy exploring the interactions between technology and society. Alipoor began this with The Believers Are But Brothers, a hi-tech look at the crisis of masculinity through the lens of online fantasy and violence.
Alipoor’s follow up show, Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, looked at entitlement and consumption in a world where digital technology becomes comes complicit in social apartheid and gentrification as it promises a world of online aspiration and glamour. Things Hidden… takes things further.
“The show is also about internet culture and how we behave on the internet,” says Alipoor. “What this story allows us to do is have a lot of fun with the way we investigate stuff on the internet. Because if you hear about a story like what happened to Fereydoun Farrokhzad, there are two ways that you immediately think about how to investigate it on the internet. One is through Wikipedia, and the other is Murder Mystery podcasts, which are so ubiquitous these days, and which we have fun sending up.”
With so much going into the show, how might Alipoor describe it to any random festival surfers who might stumble on it online?
“I would it is quite a surreal and fun show, because it's a deep dive, like the Internet can be. One of the things the internet has done, and connectivity has done, and globalisation has done, they’ve left us all a bit dizzy as we look for an answer, and someone to tell us how to think. But actually, when I talk about the show, and I talk about Iran, but also China and Ukraine and all these places, there’s an empowering note.
“That empowering note is about going, we’re all connected to these places all the time, and it's up to us to find a way of arming ourselves with the best knowledge and the best understanding possible. The days of someone being able to tell you what's right and wrong about it are so gone.”
Traverse Theatre, 15-27 August, various times.
The List, August 2023.
Ends
Comments