“Food is a common language around the world. It doesn’t need translating. It doesn’t need explanation,” Atoosa Sepehr says. Its real magic, as she shows in From a Persian Kitchen, the 2018 cookbook on the Iranian dishes she grew up with, is that cuisine can morph from universal to personal. “When you smell something, when you taste something, it can take you right back to times and moments.”
My English Persian Kitchen, the play based on her life, centres around ash-e reshteh, a traditional Iranian stew made with noodles, lentils and herbs. Another contender was a prune and chicken stew, the signature dish of Sepehr’s grandmother, who died the day after Sepehr fled Iran with no time to say her goodbyes.
“Because the ingredients are different here it doesn’t taste quite the same – the prune is very, very sour in Iran,” she says. “But still, every time I make that, I am in my grandma’s kitchen and I can feel her.”
It’s remarkable that it’s taken so long for the creative worlds of cooking and theatre to combine as with My English Persian Kitchen. Now in its second residency at the Soho Theatre in London, and about to visit Dublin and Belfast, the play begins with our protagonist starting to make ash-e reshteh in her London flat.
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That transports her back to when she was eating it with friends in Iran – just before she finds out that her estranged husband intends to block her leaving the country to start a new life.
The show then takes a turn, delivering flashes of memories of her escape from the abusive marriage and the trauma of leaving her home country, all while returning to making the dish in front of the audience – a dish our protagonist wants to make perfect because “they’re” coming, raising the question of who “they” are.
David Luff, who was Soho Theatre’s head of theatre at the time, had seen an article about Sepehr’s story, and he brought the idea to Hannah Khalil, the Irish-Palestinian writer of A Museum in Baghdad (who is also one of the artistic directors of the Not Beckett festival, an exploration of contemporary Irish identity), but she was hesitant to take it on.
“I didn’t know why I was asked, because I don’t know anything about Iran,” she says.
Encouraged by her husband, Chris White, who would become the play’s director, Khalil agreed to initial conversations. What emerged were the universal themes of Sepehr’s story – patriarchy, family, community – as well as, most of all, the immigrant experience of having to start from scratch, which is what happened when Khalil’s parents divorced and her Irish mother moved to London and needed to build a community around her.
“As soon as I understood that, everything clicked into place,” Khalil says.
Khalil envisaged that the play would incorporate cooking. “It strikes me that food is always about community, as is theatre. You’re bringing a group of people together, sitting together and sharing something really intimate and personal, and that’s a beautiful connection.
“Also, what’s more theatrical and immediate than being able to use all of your senses? We so rarely get to use smells and tastes when watching a play,” she says. “And I am not the kind of woman who would ever make someone sit through a show smelling delicious food and not let them eat it at the end.”
So once the play has ended and the dish is made, we’re invited to come and have a hearty bowl, served by its sole performer, Isabella Nefar.
The great skill of Nefar’s performance, Khalil says, is the way she commands the tonally shifting narrative while cooking a stew. The production feels as entwined as it is lean: the pace neatly works with each step of the complex recipe, and the set design plays its part too, from the steam swirling upwards from the pot as the dish is prepared – a gentle reminder of the present, however fraught the past is – to the fridge on which Sepehr’s fuzzy black-and-white childhood photographs are projected.
Sepehr was born in Shiraz in 1977. Her family moved to Genoa, Reggio Emilia and other Italian cities, with their food-rich culture, before returning. She eventually became a software engineer, then changed direction: after taking an MBA, she started an import-export business in Tehran, the Iranian capital.
Once she left her marriage and escaped Iran for London, in 2007, she found comfort – and community – in cooking Iranian classics. Eventually she wrote From a Persian Kitchen, a book that wistfully harks back to her home country, with recipes for intriguing dishes such as lamb shank with quince and prunes, Persian stuffed aubergine and, of course, ash-e reshteh.
Sepehr has seen My English Persian Kitchen twice in this year’s Soho Theatre run, and a dozen times when it premiered last year. Sharing her story for the stage has been a difficult, she says, “but also healing, because I never went through everything when I came here. I shut down everything – I just didn’t want to think about it.
“I didn’t know it at the time, because I was trying to survive, but I had depression. I was completely all over the place. I didn’t have time to sit and mourn, or feel sorry for myself. I had to find a place to live; I had to find my place in a new environment. Early on, my ex found my number and was calling me, e-mailing me, threatening my family,” she says.
“At times I wondered if I made the right decision, whether it would have been better to stay in Iran. Now I’ve been able to look back, I know I made the right choice.”
In 2013 she met her partner, who is from Wicklow. After a period living between London and Dublin – where they were unable to get a mortgage because of the effects of Brexit – the couple moved to Belfast. Happily, it has been much smoother to start anew this time around. Three years in, she has truly settled.
“I feel like I belong to this part of the world. People in Belfast are very warm, very welcoming. And because I’ve been travelling to Ireland for years, it felt like coming home,” Sepehr, who is now a nutritionist, says. “Wherever I go in Belfast I see mountains around, and I can go to the sea. And you can walk everywhere – it’s like a small village but has everything a city does.”
Khalil’s connection to Ireland is equally strong: her mother is from Kilkenny, and, growing up, they partly lived in their cottage next to the family farm. “I proudly identify as Irish-Palestinian. I spent a good two months or more of my childhood years here,” she says.
“School finished in Dubai in June because it was so hot, and then we would fly to Ireland for an extended summer. Schools here were still going, so my mum would ring up the head teacher and they’d take us in for a month and a half. The other kids were, like, ‘Who are these people?’”
These connections explain why My Persian Kitchen is visiting Dún Laoghaire and Belfast, along with the Bristol Old Vic, where Khalil is writer-in-residence.
Khalil hints at changes that might be introduced when the show is performed in Ireland – “a little gift to my Irish family” – but adds that the play already speaks to the Irish audience as part of a nation of emigrants. “That’s why it hurts me so badly when I see some of the things happening in Ireland. But I don’t think that’s the many; I think that’s the few.”
There are whispers of the play being adapted for the screen, although you sense that Sepehr will only believe it when she sees it. “When I got the email from David Luff about wanting to make a play, I really thought it was spam. Everything that’s happened has been a surprise after surprise. So I don’t know what to expect next.”
My English Persian Kitchen is at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, on Tuesday, October 21st, and Wednesday, October 22nd, and the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, on Friday, October 24th, and Saturday, October 25th
