During the closing months of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the beleaguered residents of a Tehran apartment block cower from Saddam Hussein’s bombs. Some will flee to the relative safety of Iran’s northern provinces, while others opt to stick it out. A woman comforts her anxious young daughter while her husband is away on the front line.
But this is not a conventional war story. When the neighborhood is stalked by a malevolent, paranormal spirit known as a djinn, centuries-old religious belief collides with secular modernity in an uncanny echo of the social convulsions that precipitated the 1979 Iranian revolution. Naturalism gives way to supernatural horror as personal angst dovetails with collective trauma.
This London stage version of Babak Anvari’s 2016 Persian-language movie, “Under the Shadow,” is painfully timely. When U.S. and Israeli bombs began falling on Tehran in February, residents again decamped to the north in droves; despite a recent lull, airstrikes have resumed this week, and the future remains uncertain.
Carmen Nasr’s adaptation, performed in English and running at the Almeida Theater through July 4, is directed by Nadia Latif, featuring several cast members with family ties to Iran, including Leila Farzad, whose Iranian parents lived through the 1979 revolution. She plays the embattled mother, Shideh, who has been blacklisted from her medical studies because of her past involvement in leftist activism. Shideh’s husband, Iraj — himself a doctor, now drafted into military service — urges her to move on and wants them to have another child. (He is played by Nicholas Karimi, a Scottish actor also of Iranian heritage.)
But Shideh is grieving the death of her own mother and deeply ambivalent about parenthood. Her 7-year-old daughter, Dorsa (Erin Jemotte), seems all too aware of this, laconically reproaching her for not baking cakes and not having a job. When Shideh protests that homemaking is a job, Dorsa counters, “That’s just tidying up!”
These anxieties, as much as the ravages of war, form the locus of the drama when the djinn makes its appearance halfway through the play. The haunting is rendered by the usual means: rustlings, creakings and mysterious pacing sounds.
Two big jump-scares, when the djinn’s long-fingered silhouette suddenly appears before us in a flash amid the gloom, had the opening night audience shrieking in thrilled terror on Tuesday, although other tricks — books tumbling out of bookcases, a cupboard door swinging open of its own accord — drew awkward laughter.
It’s a fine line between horror and schlock, but the slight air of unreality lends a pleasing ambiguity to the proceedings. The more stubbornly rationalist theatregoer can interpret the djinn not just as a metaphor for PTSD, but as a hallucination brought on by stress.
The tension between folk superstition and secular rationalism is a running theme: One of Shideh’s neighbors keeps an evil eye over her doorway but insists it’s “just aesthetics”; Shideh is a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, but changes her tune when she learns that the djinn is coming for her daughter.
Ben Stones’s set is an accurate rendering of an affluent Tehran home in the 1980s. The décor’s palette, a mix of browns and mustard yellow, is true to the period; a Miró exhibition poster on the wall is a smart nod to the Europhilia of the Iranian bourgeoisie. When the air-raid sirens go off, Shideh and Dorsa join their neighbors in a basement shelter represented by a torchlit pit in the stage. Their conversations revolve around a shared dilemma: to stay or to leave?
“Under the Shadow” is an admirably ambitious attempt to channel social and political resonance through psychological horror. The show eschews the thrill-a-minute overkill of recent stage horror successes like “Stranger Things” (now in its third year on the West End) and the Broadway-bound “Paranormal Activity,” in favor of a slow-burn treatment.
Yet it doesn’t fully succeed. The glacial pacing of the early scenes should engender a sense of dread, but the exposition-heavy dialogue kills the tension. The two-hour run time is longer than the movie’s, and the intermission breaks the momentum just as things are starting to gather pace.
The denouement, however, still packs a punch. In a spine-tingling standoff, the horrible djinn opens its arms to Dorsa and tries to entice her into a fatal hug by offering her the love she hasn’t been getting from her depressed and frazzled mother. In her desperation, Shideh says “I love you” three times, and that does the trick, dispelling the djinn for good.
We are left to ponder another pleasing ambiguity: the uneasy alignment of the play’s feminist politics with its allegory of love. Poor Shideh, robbed of her dream career and wrestling with grief, must put aside her ennui — get over it, just as her husband recommended — in order avoid losing her child to an evil demon.
Spiritual happiness entails political quietism: Iran’s conservative clerics would surely approve. The outcome is ideologically unsatisfying, and sadly rings all the truer for it.
The post In This Timely Play, a Ghost Haunts War-Torn Iran appeared first on New York Times.
