Review: English (The Other Place, RSC)

Review by Raphael Kohn

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

It’s a summer of Pulitzer winners opening in the UK. We just had Between Riverside and Crazy opening at the Hampstead Theatre. Soon to open will be The Book of Grace at the Arcola Theatre. Meanwhile, up in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Sanaz Toossi’s English opens the RSC’s studio theatre, The Other Place. Having been out of action as a theatre for a while, it might be a bold move to open with such a play, perhaps. Nevertheless, it’s a good one, bringing an interesting, if at times puzzling, work to the stage for its UK premiere.

We join Marjan (Nadia Albina), an English teacher in Iran, in her English class to deliver a six-week crash course in English language to a group of students to help them to pass the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). Her students are an eclectic bunch – a medical student, a grandmother, a young man and an 18-year-old. Week by week, their English improves, but it soon becomes pretty clear that the play is about much more than that.

And so, despite a slightly too long exposition at the beginning, we find the learning of English to become a vehicle for exploring other matters. How does English, as a language, act as a form of linguistic colonialism over others? How does speaking in another language affect the sense of self and identity? How do those who speak English with an Iranian accent experience prejudice, especially in the West? All of these are deep, philosophical questions, more asked than answered by the play.

Episodically, we dip into their classrooms, like an observer seeing only flashes of the long, arduous process. And so, each character’s journey becomes believable and engrossing, even despite the 90-minute runtime. There’s so much to explore on each person’s own exploration and development. Everyone is learning English for a different reason, and the play really allows itself to get deep into it.

Marjan insists on English being the only spoken language in the class, going as far as to discipline students who speak Farsi. But in a play in which canonically the characters speak in both English and Farsi, without a subtitling board, playwright Toossi engages a clever trick – every line is spoken in English, with the delineations between what is said defined by the accents they are spoken in. English is spoken in broken, Iranian-accented English, while Farsi is spoken in fluent, British-acccented English. Perhaps it is something that takes a while to get used to, but it’s tremendously effective.

Marjan seems to put up barriers – her insistence to only speak in English mirrored by Albina’s bold, stubborn performance. Indeed, despite Elham (a wonderfully engaging Serena Manteghi) and Goli (Sara Hazemi)’s lapses into Farsi, she almost never lets herself speak Farsi, instead calmly reminding the students of her rules. It feels as if we almost never get to fully get to know Marjan’s reasons though, with the play never giving us the satisfaction of truly understanding her. We get snippets of her character, but never the chance to fully get to know her.

The play’s biggest twist comes from Omid (Nojan Khazai), who spends much of the beginning of the play silent in class, but begins to open up more. I can’t spoil it here – you’ll have to buy a ticket to know what happens – but his restrained, gradually-developing performance is excellent. However, the most interesting of the students has to be Roya (Lanna Joffrey), who despite having the least time on stage, has the most questions to raise. It is through Roya that we get to truly get under the skin of some of the play’s most interesting questions, of identity, prejudice, and belonging.

There’s nothing more refreshing in such a play than an excellently assembled cast – and Lotte Hines’ casting provides this in spades. It’s much less how each of them individually performs, and much more that they are a precise, perfectly cast ensemble, who work together to create an utterly believable and engrossing world. The play is a slow one – and I for one loved the pacing to allow space to consider and reflect on the themes – and each of them delivers precise, nuanced characterisations.

It's all very naturalistic. On Anisha Fields’ simple, classroom set, leaving very little to the imagination yet very little on stage, Diyan Zora’s direction is simple, putting the focus squarely on the actors and their performances. Not least, Zora allows humour to come out of the production, with quips and jibes punctuating the seriousness of the drama. Despite the deep and political questions the play raises, there’s some laughter too.

It may leave slightly too many questions unanswered, and risk being too confusing at times, but for a 90-minute dive into the power of language to shape identity, English is really quite a powerful evening at the theatre. It’s funny, touching and leaves you thinking long after leaving the building.

English plays at the RSC The Other Place until 1 June 2024, then at the Kiln theatre from 5-29 June 2024. Tickets for both runs from https://www.rsc.org.uk/english/

Photos by Richard Davenport