Experimental Play Echo Pushes the Boundaries of What Live Performance Can Be at Malthouse Theatre

Most theatre and stage plays – both in Australia and around the world – are tightly scripted and thoroughly practised over the course of weeks, with rehearsals, table reads and lines memorised by heart. But for Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, who has spent his career questioning theatrical conventions, experimentation and spontaneity make a big difference. “I used to say theatre needs to wake up. I think I would [now] say theatre has woken up.”

So-called cold reads, or sight reads, where performers see the script for the first time just before or during their live performance, are increasingly rare in publicly staged productions – but they’re one of the playwright’s narrative signatures. “The key to [cold reads] is patience. The other one is honesty,” he says. “There’s no way you can lie in a cold read. If you make a mistake, you should laugh and say, ‘I made a mistake, let me correct it’. And everyone would clap and laugh. That’s an amazing tool in life.”

This experimental method has carried him through a trilogy of plays based on his life. The third instalment, Echo: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen, will have its Australian debut for a limited run at the Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre.

“ Echo is … remote magic,” explains Soleimanpour from his home in Berlin. It features what he describes as “mad crazy technology”: audio, video and a bit of AI. “It casts a new performer, and I perform with them, but in a unique way. I perform from another place and another time. The show … touches on four seasons of my life. [It] talks about home, time itself, like how we move in time and space, both internally and externally.” It’s also about pure feeling: “It’s the first day that you realise you’re in love with someone. That is the feeling that I think you get from Echo.”

Previously, Soleimanpour created White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, which showed at the Malthouse’s Beckett Theatre in 2013, and Nassim, which debuted in Melbourne in 2018. Where White Rabbit, Red Rabbit established the cold-read format with multiple performers opening a single manila envelope containing the script, Nassim expanded the concept to explore language and communication barriers.

Echo now pushes the trilogy into new territory, blending live performance with pre-recorded elements. Each night will see a different actor – the cast includes Ben Lawson, Pia Miranda, Nadine Garner, comedian Michelle Brasier, journalists Jan Fran and Stan Grant, and presenter David Campbell – receive the play’s script for the first time, with no idea what’ll be asked of them. This is also Soleimanpour’s second collaboration with Palestinian-Italian director Omar Elarian, who previously directed Nassim.

While audiences won’t know the specific plot or characters beforehand, they can expect to witness a performance unlike anything else they’ve seen on stage. “It sneaks [up on you] and makes you laugh, and then it starts peeling into very deep, profound, painful things about my personal life, which somehow resonates with people, because we’re all human beings.”

Secrecy plays a big part in Soleimanpour’s plays – not for novelty’s sake, but to imitate how life actually happens. “We want to keep the authenticity of an encounter,” explains Soleimanpour. “We want to keep it fresh, so that we can all experience it together again and again. It is a rehearsal, not only in the theatrical sense, but in the social way. We’re practising encountering a new person … trying to dive deep into the most profound concepts of life.”

He breaks that secrecy slightly though, quoting directly from Echo in his chat with Broadsheet and referencing how theatre is a communal experience: “In the world where everything is falling apart, gathering in a theatre is an act of resistance on a galactic scale.”

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Malthouse Theatre. Echo: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen runs from July 14 to 19 at the Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre. Tickets are available at malthousetheatre.com.au.