Review: My English Persian Kitchen

It’s the most ubiquitous comfort food: a bowl of noodle soup, steaming and fragrant, a momentary defence against life’s difficulties. There’s the chicken noodle soup you mainline when sick, the ramen that inoculates against a cold winter night. And there’s ash-e-reshteh, a thick Iranian stew filled with pulses and herbs, that is made from scratch right in front of us during My English Persian Kitchen. Based on cookery writer Atoosa Sepehr’s life, the play entangles two timelines: her frightening departure from Iran in the wake of an abusive marriage and her present moment cooking for unnamed guests. Chopping parsley, soaking lentils and grinding saffron, Atoosa is determined to make the ash perfect; yet recovery isn’t a recipe, and the linearity she seeks begins to crumble as the trauma from the past disrupts the desperately sought peace of the present.

The claustrophobia of violent memories is arrestingly conveyed: clever lighting design making Atoosa’s world feel alternately expansive and suffocating, while sudden phone calls and whispered threats in Farsi puncture the stillness of the stage. Yet the show loses some of its propulsion in a somewhat aimless script: some of its most intriguing ideas, such as the complicity between domestic violence and the patriarchal state violence of the Islamic Republic, remain frustratingly unexplored in favour of a more obvious depiction of trauma. The paradoxical position of gender in Iranian society is a powerful moment of tension, while more obvious metaphors, such as turmeric staining the hands like blood or an awkwardly deployed copy of Wuthering Heights falls flat. Ultimately, My English Persian Kitchen feels a little like the stew that threads through it and is served at the end: wholesome and well-intended, if a touch simple. Yet there’s something comforting about its well-trodden, straightforward fare.