How many plays have you seen featuring Iranian characters? Probably not many, if any! Rather than sitting around lamenting the fact that Iranian stories have scarcely been told on stage in London, I decided to dive headfirst into sharing these stories myself.
You may have heard about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the dual British-Iranian citizen who was arrested in Iran in April 2016. She was returning to London after visiting family with her baby daughter. She had done nothing wrong; to this day, she remains imprisoned in Iran, her daughter now living with her Iranian grandparents. Then, last year Trump put his travel ban in place, temporarily blocking citizens from 7 Muslim countries from entering the US. Suddenly, Iranian-Americans who had lived and worked in the US for years, as well as their families, were blocked off from the place they called home.
These cases of dual belonging – the home that comes with your ethnicity and the one that comes with your nationality – kept swirling around in my head. I kept questioning what it means to be a citizen of a country, and what a country would do for its people when they needed help.
With all this going on last year, I felt I needed an outlet to respond. My own parents were political refugees who fled Iran in the 90’s, and so I felt a sense of duty to all the Iranian people who were being negatively affected by these issues. Naturally, the answer to my question of ‘what can I do?’ became ‘make a piece of theatre about it’.
To create CITIZEN, I set about collecting verbatim material from a range of sources. From Nazanin’s diary entries, to interviews with my mum, conversations with the cast, and questionnaires sent to Iranians around the world. What came back were stories that were in equal turns fascinating, harrowing, moving and funny.
Drawing on my own experiences was a key part of the process. I was born and raised in Australia to Iranian parents, so I started out writing stories that I remembered from childhood. There was the culture clash of being raised in a traditional Iranian household in Australia, the stories that my mum had told me about leaving Iran, and my own experience of visiting Iran once when I was eight years old. I then contrasted those stories to my feelings about Iran now, as an adult, and the way that I’d seen Iran represented in the media.
Something I’ve learn about writing from personal experience is to find a way to disconnect from your story. An experience that might have been powerful to me in the moment doesn’t necessarily translate to an audience, so there were times when I had to be willing to cut or edit moments in order to make the best work. From the get-go I invited my cast to be co-creators – to be the outside eyes to the sections of script drawn from my life, allowing them to give me honest feedback on it as they would any other part of the play.
As I reflect on the work we’ve made and what I want audiences to get out of it, one word comes to mind: hope. Even though some of the migration stories we’ve incorporated into the show have sadness and displacement within them, the very act of sharing them is uplifting. All the people who provided their stories – from those we interviewed to those who wrote journal entries and letters for all to see- wanted the world to know that even in the darkest of times, there is hope. And so, in creating this piece of theatre, I – as well as my cast and the many contributors whose words we’ve used – want the audience to walk away remembering that at the end of the day, regardless of our ethnicity or citizenship status, we are all human. We all want and need the same things, and the more we remember this, the more each of us can contribute to a more equal society.
CITIZEN runs 24th April – 5th May.