Canberra Theatre Centre | Review by Nieshanka Nanthakrishnakumar
ECHO by Nassim Soleimanpour
For Nassim Soleimanpour ‘all the world’s (truly) a stage’, or as he likes to say ‘life is a play’… and that he proves true (or at least attempts to), in his meta-theatrical play Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen (ECHO). In ECHO, Nassim invites his audience to ‘take off their shoes’ (as custom in many ethnic cultures), step onto his ancestral Persian rug and enter into his life as an Iranian man who fled Iran in search for a new ‘home’ in Berlin, Germany. In Saturday 26 July’s showing of ECHO in Canberra, the character of Nassim is embodied by Chinese-Australian actor, Benjamin Law, who despite having some knowledge of Iranian culture, is quite far removed from Nassim’s own reality, having been born and raised in Australia. However, what the playwright and actor both share is their migrant history, as Law, in the middle of his performance, recalls a story of tracing his family’s migration from China to Malaysia – his frank and unscripted story-telling is what makes ECHO a fascinating piece of theatre.
ECHO is not your ordinary theatre performance, which is to be anticipated, as a quick read of the synopsis tells us that even the actor does not know what will unfold. As soon as Canberra Theatre Centre’s Playhouse lights dim and you are demanded the attention of an AI-generated voice, you are guaranteed an intriguing and interactive night of theatre. The audience’s initial confusion is written all over Law’s face when he answers a live video call from the playwright himself, who is calling from his apartment in Berlin. Soleimanpour breaks the fifth wall as the audience is privy to, and almost participates in, the conversation between the playwright and actor (in what initially feels like a Facetime call that your immigrant mother forces you to have with a distant relative on the other side of the world, whom you’ve never met).
Nassim has a warm and welcoming online presence which he achieves by sharing insights into his personal life, introducing his wife Shirin as she cooks up a herby Iranian dish, their dog Echo, and portraits of other meaningful characters in his life. Although Law is the man on the stage, he is merely a vessel for Nassim, who is the omnipresent and omniscient narrator. He puppeteers Law across the stage for the entirety of the play, as Law reenacts what feels like Soleimanpour’s subconscious. Law embraces the character of Nasim carefully and compassionately, adopting a commanding narrator’s voice. Throughout the performance, the audience, unusually yet beautifully, gets to witness the trust grow between playwright and actor, which is crucial in a show that is as experimental and improvised as ECHO.
Like most narratives centred on the migrant experience, ECHO at its core attempts to answer ‘where is home’ – the question that diaspora are forced to grapple with their whole lives. However Soleimanpour uniquely explores this through breaking the spacetime continuum in a technologically perplexing way. Using the mixed media, the audience is taken through the grungy streets of Berlin, the mountainous landscape of Tehran and into the cosmos, all in the span of what is seemingly one video call. At several points throughout the play the audience are forced to question their own reality of space and time, as we encounter the ghost of Nassim’s past, present and future.
The most evocative image throughout the play is Nassim’s Persian rug, which is star-studded, most literally and figuratively, having travelled around the world with the international tour of ECHO and hosting actors such as Emilia Clark and Daniel Kaluuya. The Persian rug is a symbol of Nassim’s heritage and roots, and is a slice of his home on stage. However, the play is riddled with many other metaphors (some more inspiring than others) that the significance of the Persian rug eventually feels lost on the audience. Similarly, the poeticism of Soleimanpour’s writing feels lost to the novelty and thrill of the high-tech and theatrics of the performance. The spectacle of ECHO often overrides its storytelling, which is a shame because the message it tries to deliver about the quandary of where is home for oppressed communities, is more important than ever.
However, it is undeniably a privilege to watch what can be labelled an Iranian play in Australia during a time when Iranians, including Iranian-Australians, are being forced to flee their country due to terrestrial threat. The audience, by entering Nassim’s life through watching ECHO, leave with a deeper sense of understanding and empathy for the plight of Iranians, and hopefully oppressed communities at large. This is what makes ECHO an urgent watch today.
Nieshanka Nanthakrishnakumar is a Sri Lankan Tamil-Australian performance poet and emerging writer and theatre-maker. She has performed at the Sydney Writers Festival and the Melbourne Spoken Word Festival, and has been published in the NSW Young Writers Showcase and the Australian Poetry Journal. She also recently participated as an artist in Canberra Theatre Centre’s 2025 New Ideas Lab.
