Sanaz Toossi’s ‘English’ unpacks the complexity of navigating the world with an accent

English

By Sanaz Toossi, directed by Anahita Dehbonehie and Guillermo Verdecchia. Until March 5 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca or 416-866-8666

Sanaz Toossi’s award-winning play is set in a language school classroom in Karaj, Iran, in 2009. Four students have different, complex reasons to learn English and their teacher’s experience is not straightforward either.

This setup establishes clear expectations. Personalities will emerge, relationships will form, secrets will be revealed. Some of the students will succeed and others will fall by the wayside.

All of this happens but, at the same time, the play is not predictable, thanks to Toossi’s subtle writing and profound observations about the ways in which language shapes identity, experience and a sense of belonging in the world.

Given how focused the play is on location and identity, it’s unfortunate that this Canadian premiere production feels out of place in Soulpepper’s largest 300-plus-seat theatre.

Designer Anahita Dehbonehie (who also co-directs with Guillermo Verdecchia) has done typically beautiful work in fashioning a set to fill the stage space, with areas with desks on either side of the classroom and a rectangular frame hanging overhead to represent the ceiling and suggest intimacy. But play and production would have made more sense in a studio theatre where audiences could be closer to the actors and observe the nuances in their performances and relationships.

That said, there was a very warm connection on opening night between the actors and audience, many of whom were evidently members of the Iranian community, given the frequent physical and vocal moments of recognition. This included my viewing companion, who happily noted many well-observed details and themes: the way a character cleans off the top of a can of Coke with a tissue before opening it, the centrality of the mother in Iranian culture.

Fascinatingly, given the subject matter, there is very little Farsi spoken in the play. Rather, the characters speak English with an accent when we’re to understand they’re speaking English, and without when they’re using their native tongue. That adds a level of complication for the all-Iranian cast that, across the board, they handle beautifully. There are many welcome moments of situational and interpersonal humour in the play amid more serious themes.

Ghazal Partou plays the dedicated and imaginative teacher Marjan, a returned migrant who uses the classroom to stay connected to the English language and, it’s implied, have agency outside her household. Her thoughtful performance captures the character’s combination of kindness, rigour and low-level longing (she “likes herself better in English”). Ghazal Azarbad is a standout as the tough, ambitious Elham, whose only barrier to medical school in Australia is passing the Test of English as a Foreign Language.

Banafsheh Taherian is convincing as the matriarch Roya, and it’s revealing to clock her and the other characters’ reactions to her son’s insistence that she learn English to gain access to her grandchild.

Aylin Oyan Salahshoor gives a sweetly compelling performance as 18-year-old Goli, for whom English will be a ticket to something and somewhere she’s not quite able to conceptualize yet. Sepehr Reybod gets his teeth into the enigmatic character of Omid, the good-natured only guy in the room whose facility with the language (how does he know the word “windbreaker”?) raises questions about his motivation to be there.

The play unpacks layer after layer of complexity in what English represents to each of the characters and about the realities of navigating the world with an accent. It seems sure to resonate with anyone who’s lived outside and between languages, and reflected my privilege as a white English-speaking American back to me in surprising and not always comfortable ways.

It’s not a play full of fireworks but rather a slow burn and, again, one whose subtleties would have benefited from a closer actor/audience relationship.

This production was programmed months before the death of Mahsa Amini sparked mass protest in Iran against the Islamic regime and, as Dehbonehie and Verdecchia write in a program note, offers a different vantage on that country than what we’re reading about and seeing these days.

This Soulpepper/Segal Centre co-production will play in Montreal after its Toronto run and it will be fascinating to follow how audiences there — where language is an ever-charged talking point — respond to it.