Iran, women, friendship: plenty to talk about

Daniel Nelson

It’s great to see a play about friendship.

It’s great to see a play about women.

It’s great to see a play about Iranians.

It’s great to see a serious play that’s fun.

So Wish You Were Here gets off to a flying start. 

There’s virtually no action on stage - apart from leg waxing, hugs, changing clothes and energetic cleaning of menstrual blood off the sofa - so the dialogue is crucial.

Luckily, it’s also great to see a play by a playwright who can write dialogue (already shown in her play, English, at the Kiln in June.)

Sanaz Toossi’s play is set in living rooms in Karaj (yes, it’s taken an American of Iranian descent to re-work the best-forgotten days of English drawing room dramas) and covers the period 1978 to 1991, during much of which the Iran-Iraq war is raging.

There’s an early portent of change and menace when one of the five disappears, and attitudes to Islam, integral to this period, are made visible in one scene, but otherwise events, such as marriage, birth, political change, emigration take place off-stage.

On stage, a lot of chat about sex and depilation gradually subsides as the women grapple with other issues, not least their relationship with each other. 

Even with the understated emotional confronttion at the end, the play is a little long, but it’s a fascinating journey through lives and years of which we rarely get a glimpse.

* Wish You Were Here, £5-£24, is at the Gate Theatre, 26 Crowndale Road, NW1 1TT, until 23 November. Info: Gate +  free with tickets to three playlets by British-Iranian writers: 8 Nov, Maids, by Jasmin Mandi-Ghomi; 15 Nov, Between Beats and Hearts, by Melina Namdar; 22 Nov, The Veil, by Afsaneh Grey