White Rabbit Red Rabbit
28/05/2016 - 11/06/2016
Production Details
A rotating cast of performers take on Nassim Soleimanpour’s non-traditional play This play is top secret. It has been sealed inside an envelope, and the actor performing it has never seen it. In fact, there is a new performer every night, and each of them have only been told three essentials: Do not Google this play. Prepare to impersonate an ostrich. Once you start, you must finish… no matter what.
Centrepoint Theatre is proud to present, in association with Aurora Nova Productions, White Rabbit Red Rabbit – a potent reminder of the transgressive and transformative power of theatre. Some might call it a play. But it’s a lively, global sensation that no-one is allowed to talk about.
Forbidden to leave his native Iran, Soleimanpour wrote it to travel the world in his place. The audience joins each performer on a journey into the unknown; stumbling upon the personal and profound, the limits of liberty and ultimately where theatre can take you. Wildly predictable and completely unforgettable, this ‘theatre entertainment meets social experiment’ is unlike anything, and will make you question everything.
Centrepoint Theatre will host a wide array of stage and screen talent from Manawatu and beyond for this strictly limited two-week season, including: Geraldine Brophy (How To Murder Your Wife), Laura Daniel (Jono and Ben), Torum Heng (Go Girls), Laura Hill (Shortland Street), the Modern Maori Quartet’s Jamie McCaskill, and Sophie Hambleton (Westside)…with more to be announced.
Will you participate? Will you be manipulated? Will you listen? Will you really listen? Don’t google for more. Join one of our eleven performers and take the leap.
“A playful, enigmatic and haunting show that takes on a gravity that prickles your skin, and keeps taking unexpected turns that often lead us back to the relief of laughter. Any worthy theatrical experience is a dive down into a rabbit hole, where the destination is unknown. The distinction of White Rabbit Red Rabbit is that the performer moves right alongside us on the journey.” – The New York Times
“A dazzling, transcendent piece of alive-and-kicking theatre…I experienced a play that no one in the world will ever experience again… the whole building felt like it was living and breathing.” – Entertainment Weekly
WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT
Centrepoint Theatre, 280 Church Street, Palmerston North
28 May – 11 June 2016
Wednesday 6.30pm; Thursday – Saturday 8pm; Sunday 5pm
Tickets: Adult $40; Under 30/Senior/Community Services Card $32;
Tertiary $20; High School $18; Group 10+ $36pp
Bookings: 06 354 5740 or www.centrepoint.co.nz
ABOUT NASSIM SOLEIMANPOUR
Nassim Soleimanpour is an independent multidisciplinary theatre maker from Tehran, Iran. His plays have been translated into more than 20 languages. Best known for his play White Rabbit Red Rabbit, written to travel the world when he couldn’t, his work has been awarded the Dublin Fringe Festival Best New Performance, Summerworks Outstanding New Performance Text Award and The Arches Brick Award (Edinburgh Fringe) as well as picking up nominations for a Total Theatre and Brighton Fringe Pick of Edinburgh Award.
By the time Nassim was permitted to travel for the first time in early 2013, his play White Rabbit Red Rabbit had been performed over 200 times in 15 languages. Since then Nassim has facilitated workshops an panels in different countries including World Theatre Festival (Brisbane), Tohuistuin (Amsterdam), SESC Vila Mariana (Sao Paulo), Schauspielhaus (Vienna), DPAC (Kuala Lampur), Theatretreffen (Berlin), British Council (London), Asia House (London) and University of Bremen (Germany).
Nassim’s second play Blind Hamlet for the London-based Actors Touring Company premiered as the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has since toured extensively around the UK and was received well in Bucharest and Copenhagen. Nassim now lives in Berlin with his wife Shirin and dog Echo. His third play BLANK premiered in November 2015 at Dancing on the Edge Festival in Amsterdam.
ABOUT PLAYS WITH A PURPOSE:
Centrepoint Theatre presents White Rabbit Red Rabbit alongside two other events – a professional production of local playwright Angie Farrow’s The Politician’s Wife, and a rehearsed reading of Lampedusa by Anders Lustgarten – as part of its inaugural ‘Plays with a Purpose’ season. This season-within-a-season aims to provide a launchpad for discussion of some major issues facing us today; 2016 being a collection of plays dealing with two strands of the discussion; firstly, political oppression, and the problems surrounding displaced refugees and how much responsibility we have to help care for these people without a home. “Theatre is, of course, a place where you can come to be entertained and amazed, but it can also be a place where we as a community come together to figure out stuff, to be provoked,” says artistic director Jeff Kingsford Brown. “‘Plays with a Purpose’ provides a forum, in easily-digested, bite-size pieces of theatre, for this to happen.”
Producer: Nathan Mudge
Technical Designer/Operator: Tyler White
Theatre ,
Rose to the challenge splendidly
Review by John C Ross 30th May 2016
Remarkably clever, challenging, often funny, more often disturbing, thought-provoking – and you do go on thinking about it … All this is true of this show, yet the game-rules require that what happens in it is kept secret, even by reviewers. What’s the significance of the title? You’ll have to go find out.
For each performance, there is a sole and different Actor (gender-neutral), who has never done it before, seen another performance or even read the script, before s/he takes it out of an envelope and gets under way. All they’ve been told is: do not Google this play; prepare to impersonate an ostrich; once you start, you must finish… no matter what.
The audience likewise is given no foreknowledge, except about these rules. At certain points, a few willing members of the audience are invited on to the stage and told to do various things, none of them too scary.
What one can say is that accepted conventions and notions about what a play is, and what the essential relationships are between playwright, dramatic character(s), performing actor(s) and audience, get radically unpacked. Moreover, this show is described as “theatre entertainment meets social experiment”; and having a fresh performer, and a fresh audience, means there’s a unique “experiment” with every performance, as well as a unique ambience. Tricky!
Nassim Soleimanpour is an Iranian, and at the time his play was sent out into the world he was banned from leaving his country. Hence he had even less capacity than playwrights usually have to influence what theatre-groups and performers might make of it, or even to witness their efforts. Even so, it has received several important Fringe Theatre awards and by now has been performed in fifteen languages. Since 2013 he has been able to travel (he now lives in Berlin), has conducted workshops and panels, and has written two other plays.
The setting is quite simple, with a step-ladder stage left and a small table stage right, holding two glasses of water, one of which may or may not, later on, be laced with deadly poison.
For the performance I saw, the Actor was Carrie Green, and she rose to the challenge splendidly. While it’s not Improv, it does demand something like the same kind of quick-response, full-on acting. Centrepoint’s programme lists ten other performers.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Comments