What are your limits of obedience?

This Soho Place production of “White Rabbit, Red Rabbit” has lined up a star-studded cast–from Catherine Tate to Miriam Margolyes to Jason Isaacs–to engage in a strange experiment orchestrated by a crazy Iranian (<- I can say this because I’m also a crazy Iranian). Each night, a different actor walks onto the slowly revolving stage (set in the round), takes a red envelope from a chair, takes out the script, and reads from it cold–that is, with no rehearsal or preparation. On 4 October, 2024, it was Michael Sheen’s night to discover the script. And it’s difficult to imagine an actor better suited to navigate this text, one that oscillates between whimsy and gravity–and sometimes gives its audience both options: to laugh or to meet it (and its writer?) somewhere more profound.

There are three intertwined stories told over the play’s brisk run of 60-ish minutes. Two are rabbit-based fables about living in a repressive regime. And then there’s the third story. And this is the one that threads the play together. It’s the story of the playwright, the actor, and the audience – in a room together even though the playwright is not actually there. If, like me, you’re a sucker for the power of theatre, and you’re Iranian on top of that, and you’re watching your favorite actor do a play about your country, this part might leave you weeping uncontrollably. But if none of this applies to you, you’re probably in for a fun night of experimental theatre with plenty of laughs built-in (mostly riffs on the fact that the actor is at the mercy of a crazy Iranian playwright who is making them do silly thing) and some moments of deeper subtext that you can choose to invite in or ignore.

If you google the play “White Rabbit, Red Rabbit,” the first thing you learn is that it’s a cold-read play. If you read a little more, you will probably also learn that Nassim Soleimanpour wrote the play as a way to connect with the outside world after he refused to participate in Iran’s mandatory military service and was therefore forbidden from traveling outside of Iran. Is there a word for this in English? A word for the opposite of “exile”? We have one for it in Farsi, for this uniquely Iranian form of punishment: mamnoo-ol-khoorooj. Soleimanpour doesn’t teach his audience this word, or badger them with any sociology or history lessons on Iran. But he tells them just enough to let them infer that there is deeper context here. “There are many young people like me,” Soleimanpour tells us after explaining that he can’t leave the country. Yes, that’s why we need a word for it.

What you won’t learn from googling the play is that Soleimanpour wrote the play in the midst of the “Green Revolution” protests in Iran–an event that is largely forgotten in the West, but indelibly seared into the Iranian consciouness. It was a moment of hope, and the first time in my life that an opposition movement in Iran dared publicly question the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic rather than hide behind the rhetoric of “reforms within the system.” We know in hindsight that it was a failed revolution. But at the time it felt like we had marched our way right to the brink of a new beginning, a hope so sharp and searing it hurts to think back on it.

Soleimanpour doesn’t tell you any of this context. Nor does he ever fully turn this into a “protest play.” And it’s the correct choice, letting the actor and the audience shape the experience differently each night instead of boxing the play into being just one thing. It’s also in keeping with the tradition of Iranian art to write in subtext–this is how we’ve learned to tell stories because of the stringent censorship laws in our country. (“I have to be careful what I write,” Soleimanpour tells us at one point and it’s his clue to us that perhaps the rabbit stories are something more political.)

But what Soleimanpour does tell us is that he’s writing to us from Iran and from April 2010. And if that time period means something to you, this play hits different. I confess that when Michael Sheen (speaking as Soleimanpour) said: “I am 29 as I write this, full of hopes and energies. But I am not free.” I started to sob uncontrollably and I didn’t stop for the rest of the play. To hear the message of a failed revolution transmitted directly from 2010 to a packed room in London in 2024 was deeply powerful. Even if most of the people in the room didn’t know that the writer voicing his own troubles was also voicing the troubles of a nation in a specific moment in time.

There was also plenty in the play for people with no personal connection to the political context. In the most immediate sense, the play is about a young playwright who is not free but can travel through time and space through an actor who reads his words and therefore gives him a voice. The young playwright makes the actor and the audience do things at his command. In this way, isn’t he really present in the room with us? But the play is not just a play. It’s also an experiment. The playwright seeks to test the limits of our obedience. Will we do all that the young playwright asks? Will we stop the play at some point? And what do we do to those who dare disobey?

WRRR is not only an experimental play, it is also an acting showcase. Don’t get me wrong. This was an easy room for Michael Sheen, packed with fans (including me) who had his back no matter what choices he made. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the choices he made were really fucking good. I can’t name any performer more adept at commanding a room or winning over a crowd than Michael Sheen. You hardly remembered that this was not rehearsed. By the time he took the script out of the red envelope, he had already milked several laughs from the room with well-placed, wry looks that said: “Yes. Here we are. I don’t know what’s coming and you don’t know what’s coming and can you believe I’m doing this?” In just a couple of instances, Michael Sheen made little quips that were his and not Soleimanpour’s (and he would tell the audience that these were his little additions). These were done well and judiciously. More often, though, he would read Soleimanpour’s “spontaneous” interjections so convincingly that I would be sure for a moment he was deviating from the script, but then it would become clear it was still Soleimanpour telling him what to say.

There was plenty of humor to be mined from the script itself too. There is a moment early on where Soleimanpour quips “Super cool!” in an awkward way that was clearly meant to (deliberately and jokingly) evoke an Iranian struggling to sound like a native English speaker. Picking up on this, Michael Sheen did the “Super cool!” in a Persian accent. It takes a certain actor to get the author’s sense of humour and execute on it while reading the play cold. (The “Super cool!” came back a few more times in the script and became a running joke–so it was a choice that paid off.) The text also gave the actor plenty of opportunities to tease out laughs by pulling faces at unexpected stage directions or looking bemused by the playwright.

A lesser actor, though, might have been tempted to rely on this levity like a crutch the whole way through. Not Michael Sheen. As the themes grew darker, Michael Sheen transformed with the play, giving the subject matter the depth it deserved, and allowing the text to breathe with plenty of searing looks and dramatic pauses. The big finale was acted with such deliberate care and depth, I will be thinking of it for years to come.

SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT. If you think you will ever have the opportunity to watch a production of this play, I sincerely encourage you not to read after this point.

Though many aspects of the play will change each night depending on the audience and actor, the finale in particular will turn on the actor performing it. The central conceit of the play is that the actor might commit suicide on stage because playwright is ordering them to–and they are just finding about this now during the live reading! Very early in the play, the actor is ordered to bring a volunteer up on stage to stir in the contents of a small vial into one of two glasses of water that are on stage. We learn that the vial contains poison and that, at the end, the actor must drink one of the two glasses.

But that comes later. First, we take a detour to the story of a rabbit who goes to the circus (to see a play) and is stopped by a bear who demands that she must have a ticket. When the theatre-going rabbit (played by an audience member) finally manages to buy a ticket (with some help from another audience member who has to donate a pound), she’s then told to cover her ears with a red hat because rabbits aren’t allowed to show their ears at the theatre. And when she takes it off to wave it around and give a big cheer for the performers (who are cheetahs imitating ostriches), the crows descend to arrest her and she must hide by jumping on stage and imitating cheetahs who are imitating ostriches. This is all a pretty on-the-nose fable about religious laws in Iran, the absurdity of the surveillance state, and the hoops Iranians have to jump through to avoid unpleasant encounters with the state. But it’s charming and gives Soleimanpour the hook he needs to burst into the story and say: See? I made you do all of that, I was in the room with you.

The second story is more challenging–both darker and more difficult to wrap up in a bow in terms of its message. To me, it’s about how Iranian society will not be free as long as we fail to band together and instead punish those who strive for more. But it’s equally about other things: conformity, mortality, mob mentality, the purpose of art, guilt, and bearing witness. It’s the story of the playwright’s uncle who, one night, shoots the red rabbit who has been haunting him and a few days later, commits suicide. It turns out the uncle was crazy about rabbits and ran a cruel experiment on them. The uncle would starve a group of rabbits in a cage and then challenge them to race to a carrot atop a ladder. The first rabbit to get to the carrot would then be marked with red paint and branded the “red rabbit,” while the other rabbits are punished with freezing water. Soon, the white rabbits attack the red rabbit. And once the rabbits are well-conditioned, they attack the red rabbit even if the carrot, ladder, and water are taken away. The red rabbit is the one punished for wanting more, wanting better, managing not to starve. And Soleimanpour tells us he is afraid that the play he’s writing is like what his uncle did to the rabbits, he’s afraid his play is an instrument of death, like a gun waiting for someone to pull its trigger.

This brings us to the suicide, which is really the culmination of the main plotline of the show: the story of the writer, the actor, and the audience. After pondering his uncle’s suicide and methods of suicide of suicide, Soleimanpour tells the actor that their time to read is coming to an end. In a moment, Soleimanpour tells us, the actor will have to put down the script and utter the word “White Rabbit.” Then a volunteer will have to come up on stage and read the final two pages. Here, Michael Sheen’s acting elevated the pay to another level for me. There’s no way to describe what he did other than: he prepared to die. Very slowly, he put down the script, took off his glasses, patted down his hair, sat on the chair, and allowed for a beat to go by before saying “White Rabbit.”

After a brief race for the script, the winner (the red rabbit, if you will) makes it to the script first and takes on the role of the narrator. The red rabbit (speaking Soleimanpour’s words) tells us that the actor will soon have to drink from one of the glasses and asks us if we’re going to sit there complacent or intervene. The crowd (game as ever) shouts for Michael Sheen not to drink the poison, but nobody dares get up on stage or actually intervene. The red rabbit tells us that after the actor drinks, he will lie down on the stage (whether dead or alive and just having a rest). No one is allowed to check his health. Instead, after hearing the words “the end” everyone must exit the theatre, and leave the actor lying on stage, unsure whether he is dead or alive.

The actor is finally ordered to drink. Michael Sheen thinks about the choice for a long beat. He picks a glass and drinks it. Lies down on the stage. Closes his eyes. The red rabbit says “The End!” And Michael Sheen is committed enough not to move a muscle even when someone behind me shouts “You did a great job!” as we’re all exiting the theatre just like Soleimanpour told us to.

Highlights:

• The actors are told to prepare an ostrich impression. Michael Sheen’s ostrich was too glorious and peacock-ish for words.
• At one point in the play, Soleimanpour asks the actor how old they are. Michael Sheen mumbled indistinctly instead of answering. It was a funny “Don’t ask my age” joke. But funnier still was when Michael Sheen riffed on this later by pointing at himself and shouting “55” after Soleimanpour asked him to do an energetic bit of acting and furthermore told the audience that if they did not clap, the actor would be forced to do that bit over and over again.
• In this “energetic bit of acting” scene, Michael Sheen was told to act out (without words) the story of the rabbit going to a play, he did it so energetically he knocked over one of the two glasses of water to delighted cheers and laughs. He had to ad-lib a new part of the play where he brought the audience member back to the stage to stir in more poison, and told everyone to close their eyes so that the audience member could switch around the glasses. Ah. The magic of live theatre.
• Some of the volunteer participants made the most of their West End debuts. The theatre-going rabbit in our performance was a standout.
• In the big finale, the volunteer reading out the pages says that once the actor lies down, the audience must leave him on stage. “You’re not allowed to touch him.” This got such a huge laugh that Michael Sheen (in character as “man who may be about to commit suicide”) broke for a moment and laughed with the audience. The joke being that many in the room would love to touch Michael Sheen and everyone knows it. Ah. The magic of live theatre.