Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Edinburgh Fringe Festival (1-25 August 2024)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Warm and intimate one-woman show cleverly plays with form and memory.

There’s something inherently intimate about having somebody cook for you in their home. It’s one of the most quotidian things in the world (we must all eat), and yet there’s care and creativity in it – the time a person has taken to nourish you and show you a part of themselves. It’s this very idea that’s cleverly and movingly explored in Hannah Khalil and Atoosa Sepehr’s beautiful My English Persian Kitchen. The play has a relatively simple premise: as our protagonist cooks an enormous pot of Iranian Ash Reshteh in real-time, she recounts various memories of escaping her abusive husband in Iran and building her new life in England. But a few interesting twists on traditional theatre conventions elevate this into a really touching and innovative piece of storytelling.

At first, I wasn’t entirely on-board with real-time cooking as a narrative structure – I wasn’t convinced by the links being made between the dish and the protagonist’s memories. But as the play progresses, it becomes clear that we aren’t just watching an actor stir an empty pot – she’s really cooking, real food on a real stove. Chopped onions sizzle in the pot; added dashes of turmeric and garlic have the theatre bursting with steam and heavenly aromas. You could argue this is a bit of a gimmick, but as the play went on I became more and more enraptured in the way the simple act of cooking helps tell our protagonist’s story. Of course, we all know smell is evocative of memory, and this is especially true for our exiled heroine clinging onto her connection with her home country. The literal act of cooking also adds a sense of intimacy to the storytelling; the protagonist talks directly to the audience, and it really feels like sitting around someone’s kitchen table as they tell you their life story.

The cooking isn’t the only way the play experiments with the conventions of theatre. With so much of what we hear being our protagonist’s recollections, scenes are appropriately disjointed. In fact, we don’t even get whole scenes, so much as snippets, scattered Farsi phrases, or sometimes just a fleeting emotion – such as when the heroine gasps for air or climbs into the fridge as she recalls the feeling of being abused by her husband. The interplay of past and present is fluid, and accolades must go to director Chris White (who I think was sitting beside me in the preview performance) for the simple techniques that allow this to happen onstage. I particularly enjoyed the clever use of lighting to signal the protagonist’s slide into her memories, whether it’s a lightbulb in a soup can that becomes a campfire, or a floodlight that becomes an ominous car headlight in the darkness. 

No review of this show would be complete without acknowledging the incredible performance of actor Isabella Nefar. This is a one-woman show and she carries the emotional weight of the script superbly. Some elements of the play are quite stylised – while in the present day the protagonist speaks to us conversationally, when she slips into memory her voice and physicality is altered. Some scenes are even reminiscent of dance. This kind of stylisation is really dependent on the lead performance – overdo it and the whole thing becomes melodramatic and off-putting. Nefar nails every scene, and remains throughout a remarkably warm and likeable presence. You want to hear her tell her story, and it feels like a privilege to sit at her table.

Once I realised Nefar was really cooking on stage my first thought was for the food waste – surely the crew would eat it, food that smells this good couldn’t go to waste! As the play progressed, this noble thought turned to a more selfish one: “I would absolutely devour a bowl of this.” The play was staged at a very early 6.45pm (especially so considering the short runtime), and I do wonder if a pre-dinner start time was deliberately chosen so the audience would be particularly vulnerable to tummy rumblings. If so, it was effective, because I was ravenous and extremely grateful when, as the show concluded, the audience were all invited up to try a small portion. And let me tell you, it was absolutely delicious. A cynic could say this too was a bit of a gimmick – send them away on a full stomach and you’ll always get glowing reviews! But I thought it was a beautiful conclusion that wonderfully summed up the key themes of the show – that smell and taste and food tell their own stories, and can bring us together in a fantastically human way.