White Rabbit Red Rabbit West End review – stick to the script!

An unoccupied stage. A script on a chair. Two glasses of water. An unchanging lighting state.

That’s the preset for White Rabbit Red Rabbit, Nassim Soleimanpour’s show, now having its West End premiere after countless performances across the globe. It’s been 13 years since the show first wowed on UK shores at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011. Between now and then, it’s been presented by the likes of F Murray Abraham, Whoopi Goldberg and Nathan Lane in a globe-trotting odyssey.

The conceit is relatively simple: every night, an unprepared (and often very starry) performer picks up the script, opens it to page one and begins doing as instructed. The production has expressly asked no secrets are divulged to readers, but suffice it to say, the Iranian playwright’s text delves into themes of authority, conformity, the past, and the future. Lines from 2010 are delivered to an audience in 2024. Legacy becomes reality. Soleimanpour coins his own form of time travel.

For its West End spell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Denise Gough and Lenny Henry will all pick up the script: for its press night (also the first night of the run, because what exactly is there to rehearse?), it’s Ted Lasso and Mr Swallow star Nick Mohammed who gingerly hopped into the @sohoplace auditorium. Both Mohammed and Soleimanpour are, coincidentally, the same age.

What’s interesting is that, without director, without rehearsals, the text’s impact could be remarkably different in another performer’s hands. Mohammed rattled through passages at a rapid pace – clocking in at 55 minutes rather than the advertised 80. His nerves were, perhaps, palpable – an actor throwing caution to the wind for the sake of a stage experiment can go one of many, many ways. Mohammed felt much more at ease in the show’s early sections: pulling out belly laughs with the smallest gesture as he reacts to Soleimanpour’s text. It’d be fascinating to see what any other performer would do with similar cues – would they linger over lines? Ruminate on their implications? Sit down? Pace more? Inspect the gangways? It’s hard to tell.

This playing with form has become, in the intervening 14 years, far more common: copycat shows have refined and expanded similar devices with varying degrees of success (just as Soleimanpour has also staged similar works since).

Where Soleimanpour’s text really shines is its place at the heart of in-the-round West End space @sohoplace – the cauldron-shaped auditorium allows the audience to feel complicit, communally engaged and unavoidably linked to Mohammed’s antics. Interactions are organic – participation smooth. Mohammed, to his credit, never felt like a rabbit in the headlights – and the limelight brought on some fascinating questions.