Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World – REVIEW

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is the title of the French social scientist Rene Girard’s groundbreaking book of cultural criticism and mimesis, the process by which individuals copy one another to the point of conflict.

Its is also the title of Javaad Alipoor’s play.

British born Iranian, Alipoor heads up a company based in Manchester UK that stages multi-disciplinary productions that analyse the role and interplay of technologies, anti-colonialism, and political and sexual identity.

A co-production with the National Theatre of Parramatta, Things Hidden deals with all of these subjects using a murder-mystery at its centre and then taking us on a journey through the 21st century and our roles in it.

Things Hidden opens with Alipoor entering a blank stage and engaging the audience in a stand-up banter that seems to go on.

Just as many of the audience are wondering what we have got ourselves in for, we become engaged when Alipoor moves onto the subject of the internet and how it informs our decision making.

The audience are invited to do something usually unacceptable in a theatre, and that is to take out our phones and connect to Wikipedia, which Alipoor explains is a linear platform that feeds on itself to present information.

We then move it up a gear as a screen at the back of the stage slides open and reveals a podcaster (Asha Reid) giving us the story of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a pre-revolutionary Iranian pop-star who fled into exile only to be found murdered above a grocer’s shop in Germany 1992.

The podcast is titled Death in the Gap, with the catchphrases “The More You Understand, The More You Know” flashed up at side-stage.

Who committed the murder is only one of the questions that follows.

Helping us understand how Farrokhzad got into that situation is Iranian/Canadian Raam Emami, who first appears as a projection onto two screens.

Emami is also an international podcaster (King Raam), a musician, and an exile.

Raam, who had a small career with a band in LA during the MTV era is accompanied on stage by multi-instrumentalist musical director, Malaysian born Australian composer Me-Lee Hay.

What follows is an examination of semantics, first world perceptions versus those of the non-dominate cultures, and we go down the rabbit-hole of the murder mystery even further, as we learn more about Farrokhzad and are presented with four reasonable explanations of how he died.

With his gripping examination of the cultural processes, in 90 minutes Alipoor and company have taken us through the minefields of our time while presenting us with questions which we have to process in our own ways.

The evolution of the stage set from a blank backdrop to a constantly evolving construction with its own character is testament to the skills of set, costume and lighting designer, Benjamin Brockman.

His sets are further embellished by inventive projection and video design of Limbic Cinema, while sound designer Simon McCorry presents us with sound that is crystal clear.

Alipoor co-wrote Things Hidden with regular dramaturg Chris Thorpe.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World  premiered in Australia at the Riverside Theatre in 2022 for the Sydney Festival before its 2024 festival run.