Sanaz Toossi’s English transports us to a sparsely furnished classroom in Karaj, Iran. The instructor Marjan (Ghazal Partou) runs a tight ship: the students are there to learn English, so she insists on English only. A chalkboard tally tracks her students’ violations of that rule.
Of course, the students’ native language is Farsi. But though the tallies mount, we don’t hear any Farsi spoken onstage (save for one powerful and important exception). Instead, Toossi brings to life the characters’ linguistic struggles in a way that is fully accessible to English-speaking Soulpepper audiences. When the students are speaking in English, their language is accented, clipped and more limited in vocabulary and depth. When the audience is meant to understand that they are speaking in Farsi, their English quickens to become rich, idiomatic and emotive.
The contrast (and Marjan’s chalkboard tallies) help us catch on to this conceit quickly. We also see right away that the four students are not there for pleasure in the way adult English speakers in Canada might pursue a foreign language class. They each have weighty personal reasons for learning English.
Having passed her MCAT, the combative Elham (Ghazal Azarbad) has been accepted to medical school abroad. Her difficulty passing the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) has become an existential threat to her studies. Roya (a multi-layered Banafsheh Taherian) is emigrating to Canada and fears not being able to communicate with her granddaughter. Omid (Sepehr Reybod) – whose English seems nuanced and effortless – has an upcoming interview for a Green Card, which will allow him to live and work permanently in the US. And the youngest of the students is Goli (a spritely Aylin Oyan Salahshoor). Just eighteen, she has been bewitched by English. Uniquely for her, learning the language is a pleasure, as well as a strategy for unlocking future options.
Mining the rich vein of humour that lies beneath the learning of language, the talented cast bring laugh-out-loud life to pronunciation exercises, vocabulary recall games, and staged student conversations which skim the surface of basic greetings and favourite colours. Under the assured direction of Anahita Dehbonehie and Guillermo Verdecchia, the entirely Iranian cast lean in with playful relish in these delightful and funny scenes.
Photo by Dahlia Katz
But no matter how frequently their desks are reconfigured, and no matter which combination of the characters find themselves in conversation, the most discussed and unavoidable presence in Toossi’s play is that of the title character: the English language.
For the five Iranians on stage, English is more than an academic subject. It’s an invisible, intractable viscosity in which they are – of necessity – embedded. They talk about it. They lament its shortcomings and challenges. They alternate laughter and self-flagellation as their mouths and minds struggle to articulate English sounds and thoughts.
Students and teacher alike see and feel this sixth character clearly, and – through Toossi’s meditative script and the cast’s evocative performances – name its many powers with haunting lucidity while they struggle to achieve their varied goals.
English is a barrier and a ticket to freedom: a monolithic mountain to be scaled in order to access a better future.
English is a means to hide: a method to obscure and mask insecurities.
English is a Faustian bargain where you trade hard-fought gains of vocabulary and syntax for incremental losses of language, culture, and even self.
English is an alien symbiote that muffles the essential self, stifles the identity, and reduces one to conversational surfaces and empty humour. (For Taherian’s Roya in particular, English creates an alternative self like that of the other mother in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, from which she recoils.)
English is a relativistic proxy for self-worth and social value. It makes you a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond.
And yet . . . English can also be a form of alchemy. Once you wade through the endless muck of vocabulary and conjugation, unable to access and communicate the essence of yourself, you can burst through to a new place.. In different ways, it proves a growth catalyst for each of the five, including the conflicted teacher Marjan.
But most powerfully of all, as we’re shown in the play’s beautiful and hopeful final scene, English simply isn’t everything – despite its pretensions to the contrary. So it can also illuminate what is culturally irreducible, linguistically untranslatable and infinitely precious.
English is a hopeful, humorous and gratifyingly poetic meditation on the challenges posed to immigrants by our monolithic language and culture.
And then, when we’ve finished laughing, listening and applauding, the actors re-emerge. In an unscripted English coda, they remind us of the play’s political and human context: the continuing high-stakes battle for the soul and future of autocratic Iran. And just like that, this funny, tightly acted and skilfully mounted production becomes something even greater: an inspirational and aspirational act of solidarity.
Soulpepper’s and the Segal Centre’s co-production of English runs until March 5, 2023. Reserve tickets on soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine 2023
