Under the Shadow at the Almeida Theatre – review

It’s 1988 in post-revolutionary Iran, and Iraq is launching missile strikes at Tehran, as part of the escalation of the ongoing Iran-Iraq war. In her comfortable apartment, Shideh is watching an illegal Jane Fonda video to pass the time, while her daughter plays in the apartment below with a boy who has been orphaned by the war, watching his parents die before his eyes.

Shideh is educated, sophisticated and frustrated; a kindly neighbour brings her news that she will no longer be able to continue her medical studies because “your name is on a list” thanks to her political activism. She is determined to be a doctor, but is stuck at home while her husband, also a doctor, has to leave for the front. He wants her to escape the city, to take their daughter to safety with his family in the North. She refuses. A missile lands on the roof. Then things get really weird.

Under the Shadow, adapted by Carmen Nasr from the Bafta-winning Farsi film by Babak Anvari, is a curious play, a blend of the naturalistic and the supernatural that seeks to use the story of a haunting as a metaphor for the effects of political repression and religious extremism. Yet it also wants to be a tale of the uncanny, and in that odd mix its tone resides.

It is beautifully realised by director Nadia Latif and designer Ben Stones, who place Shideh, played with elegant conviction by Leila Farzad, in a recognisably aspirational apartment, with light streaming through the taped-up windows and a Fondation Maeght Miro poster on the wall. The bomb blast is shown with equal detail, with dust seeping out in James Farncombe’s sepia light, as the inhabitants of the apartment block shelter in a cellar, shown by grouping them in a hole at the front of the stage.

It is also genuinely scary. When things start to go bump in the night and seven-year-old Dorsa (played at this performance by Erin Jemmotte) begins to communicate with an unseen and malign spirit, the shocks of light and the creaks and inexplicable happenings in the apartment are beautifully conjured by the entire design team, including sound designer Donato Wharton.

There is something spooky and unsettling about the mysterious goings on – the loss of a doll, the neighbour Mrs Ebrahimi’s tales of possessing djinn – that adds a layer of mystery to what has seemed to be a simple story of life disrupted by war.

But while the horror elements mirror the sheer desperation of lives torn apart by a battles they cannot control, the acting is firmly rooted in the real, creating a disparate cast of characters all reacting in different ways to the situation in which they find themselves, from Souad Faress’s sophisticated Mrs Fakur, who reads books in French as the bombs fall, to Mona Goodwin’s gossipy Mrs Ebrahimi, in the grip of both religion and superstition, but genuine in her concern.

The mix is intriguing and always watchable. There’s something compelling about how unexpectedly Under the Shadow twists and turns, and its portrait of people living with terror has strong contemporary resonance as war once more rips through the Middle East.

As the djinn becomes embodied, the play’s shocks begin to stray into Woman in Black territory, and its shifts in tone become too jarring. It can’t sustain the delicate balance it has created – but it is undoubtedly both original and enjoyable.