Echo: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen, by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour and directed by Omar Elerian, is a theatrical experience that has been deliberately shrouded in mystery.
Opening this week at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, each night’s performance involves a new actor or public personality, who knows nothing about what their involvement entails.
On opening night, the foil for the show was Australian actor Ben Lawson, of Neighbours and (more recently) HBO series Mix Tape fame.
Across the remaining five performances, audiences will be able to see other personalities dropped, unawares, onto the Merlyn Theatre stage, including journalists Jan Fran and Stan Grant, and actor Nadine Garner.
Miked and equipped with an audio earpiece, the live performer is led through the work, engaging with the author of the work via apparent live video feed, from his home in Berlin.
On opening night, Lawson’s friendly awkwardness at being in front of a live audience, unprepared, seemed a deliberate counterpoint to Soleimanpour’s jovial, relaxed demeanour.
They engaged in impromptu chit-chat and Soleimanpour showed us via his phone’s video feed the inside of his apartment, and introduced us to his wife, his dog, Echo, and his extended family via the portraits on his wall.
What at times feels like a live performance at imminent risk of flying off the rails, reveals itself to be a work of meta-theatre, as the very form of the work itself is employed in the service of creating meaning for the audience.
The work engages with the very meaning of what theatre is and what is unique to it: a shared moment in space and time, for an actor (or actors) and an audience to – in some (potentially tiny) way – make some sense of ourselves and the world around us.
In Echo, using live video feed, large digital screens that are used to project text and video, we experience four seasons of a life, and connect – through Ben – with Soleimanpour’s story, across space and time and via the symbolically laden Persian carpet present on the stage.
Soleimanpour plays with the power dynamics inherent in theatre, where a writer has written lines for an actor to perform, in front of an audience who receive them. Here Lawson is the fish out of water. We feel his discomfort as our own and, through him, feel what Soleimanpour feels.
That the play is occurring in the here and now and in the past, in an apartment in Berlin and in Melbourne at the Malthouse Theatre, draws attention to the form of theatre itself, and the resulting experience is a remarkably powerful empathic journey that talks to ideas of migration, belonging and displacement and the connectedness between all of humans – regardless of culture, background or where we find ourselves born on this planet.
The fact that Iran is currently at the centre of a geopolitical disaster and that the idea of being detained at an international border based on one’s political (or perceived political) views now no longer feels like something that only happens in countries with extremist regimes, only adds to the relevance of Soleimanpour’s story.
It is difficult to talk candidly about the work without killing some of the magic of the show, except to say that the experience will delight theatre-lovers who are interested in the form itself and want to be pushed to reimagine what it is – and can be.
And it’s a live performance experience that – seemingly through subterfuge – will leave you thinking about Really Big Stuff. The value of a life. Our common humanity.
Read: Hir review: a play that explores the collision of PTSD and male privilege
Echo is an ambitious and truly innovative work of theatre – a magic carpet ride across time and space that will leave you thinking and – importantly – feeling.
Echo: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen by Nassim Soleimanpour
Malthouse Theatre
Director: Omar Elerian
Creative Technologist, Video and Production Designer: Derek Richards
Lighting Designer: Jackie Shemesh
Composer and Sound Designer Anna Clock
Dramaturgy: Kirsty Housley, Immanuel Bartz
Script Editor: Stewart Pringle
Creative Producer: Immanuel Bartz
Company Stage Manager (NSP): Rike Berg
Stage Manager: Jess Keepence
Production Manager (NSP): Ethan Hudson
AV Technician / Operator: Peter Adams
Director of Photography: Katja Rivas Pinzon
Location Recordists: Axel Lischke, Lotta Sahlstedt
Set Fitting: Jorge Andres Rivas Pinzon
Gaffer: Florian Geyer
Cast: a new unrehearsed performer every show, including Michelle Brasier, David Campbell, Jan Fran, Nadine Garner, Stan Grant, Ben Lawson, Pia Miranda
Echo: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen will be performed until 19 July 2025.
