Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran was a two-hander, combining two performers, projection, and a live Instagram account to tell a story about the obnoxious lifestyles of the kids of the Iranian elite. It won The Javaad Alipoor Company’s second Fringe First Award and transferred to Manchester before slamming into the global events of 2020 whereupon it became a live/digital hybrid experience. It ended up touring the world online.
The final part, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, tied some of these strands together. At its heart it’s a deep dive into the life, context, and murder of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a 1970s cultural icon, who I often describe as the Iranian Tom Jones. But it’s also a deep dive into the idea of a deep dive, particularly in the digital world. It uses a send-up of murder mystery podcasting, an analysis of data-driven technology, and post-colonial theory to think about the limits of the kind of thinking and living that lies at the heart of the whole trilogy: the way a certain kind of online life has maimed and limited the possibilities of thought and human imagination.
The debate we’ve been caught up in has been about whether technology is taking us to utopia or dystopia, a debate powered by the idea that technology is an agent of change. But that sense of agency has all but vanished.
I want to take this moment to think about what has happened in the past decade since I began writing the trilogy. It’s a period where the promises of digital technology and internet culture have proven to be nearly entirely illusory. The debate we’ve been caught up in has been about whether technology is taking us to utopia or dystopia, a debate powered by the idea that technology is an agent of change. But that sense of agency has all but vanished. In a way, the increasingly excited discussion about things like artificial intelligence (AI) masks the truth: the period of digital technology-powered change is over, the tech giants are tired, and the internet is basically dead.
Interestingly, across the same period I would argue that the in real life (IRL) world has found a way to smash back through the computer screen—the restatement of an embodied and corporeal politics of physical space. And so, as a theatremaker who has spent the past decade exploring digital technology and internet culture on stage, where do we go next? What would the trilogy be if I began writing it afresh today?
Going Back to the Beginning
When I started writing this trilogy in 2016 my working life was split between three things. I was just starting to make professional touring work, but I was still doing a lot of community work and engaged in political activism around the Arab Spring and anti-racism in the United Kingdom.
Thinking about the Arab Spring had profoundly shifted how I saw myself and the world politically, especially in the case of Syria. I grew as a leftist through the years of the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. A critique of what we saw as Western imperialism and wars of conquest was a foundational building block of the way I saw the world. But the Syrian revolution turned this on its head.
In the early years of the war, I remember seeing the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian National Council (SNC) calling on, even begging, the Western powers, especially the United States and United Kingdom, for access to the kind of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) that could down regime helicopters. This was before the Russians had joined, so the only real strategic lead the regime had over the revolutionaries was the airpower that came from dropping primitive bombs from helicopters. The FSA and the SNC were convinced that with these SAMs they would finish the regime.
Both the Obama and Cameron administrations refused to provide such weaponry. A lot of us ended up in the novel position of trying to amplify voices calling for Western powers to intervene more in a war in the Middle East—in this case by sending the weapons.
And then something even weirder happened. All around the world large sections of the global left lined up behind the Assad regime as it drowned the democratic aspirations of the people in their own blood.
This was a large part of what drove me into the first part of this trilogy: the investigation of the peculiar parallels between the terminally online forms of propaganda used by ISIS and the alt-right and what it revealed about this process.
Over the life of this trilogy, that process has accelerated dramatically. These processes that began at the margins have conquered the mainstream.
When I opened The Believers are but Brothers in 2017, taking an audience into a world where websites targeting young men were feeding into the far right and Islamic extremism, or where the gamification of politics was being paralleled by a rightwards radicalization of a generation of young computer gamers, felt like taking people into a world they didn’t know. But just like the fracturing of the old identities of left and right, this is a truth that people have come to live with.
Rich Kids… and the Pandemic
But if the way that social media seemed to be dragging us all into a politics and life that existed solely online, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that a different force was acting on us.
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran started out as a live play . The idea was to explore some of the same ideas that had come up in the making of Believers but from a different angle: resentment as a personal and political motivating force, the way that the rich pixelation of the digital screen seems to make our fantasies seem tastable, the way that the organization of our personal lives on social media seemed to shape the possibility of how we think about social and historical change.
It opened at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 and transferred to HOME Manchester ahead of a run at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), then onto what we hoped, like Believers, would be a world tour. But then those plans slammed headfirst into the pandemic.
We were lucky that our partners at BAC were keen for us to share a digital version of the show and supported us in trying to find a way to both support the original company of artists who made it and share it with audiences thirsty for some kind of theatre.
