Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut play, English, speaks to how language defines identity, offering audiences fresh insight.
Every member of this production’s cast and creative team has personal experiences of migration or being children of migrants.
Set in Karaj, Iran in 2008, the play’s action takes place inside an austere classroom, with its barred, curtained window suggesting its characters are all trapped by their individual circumstances.
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As the four adult learners of varying proficiency prepare to sit the Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), each character’s motivation for learning the language is revealed.
Roya (Marjan Mesbahi) has been instructed by her son that she must only communicate with her Canadian-born granddaughter in English; a fan of English in general (and Ricky Martin), Goli (Delaram Ahmadi) wants to expand her horizons; Elham (Maia Abbas) hopes to study anatomy at RMIT; and Omid (Osamah Sami), whose grasp of the English language makes fellow students question his reasons for enrolling in this class – well, revealing his backstory would be a spoiler.
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Their teacher Marjan (Salme Geransar), an Anglophile, holds our intrigue throughout – we’re just dying to discover why she returned home from Manchester. She hopes to prepare her students not only for the TOEFL exam, but also give them a reality check since relocating and making a life for yourself elsewhere means giving up parts of yourself in order to fit in.
The cast is uniformly brilliant and believable. The students also span multiple generations, which unlocks an abundance of lost in translation opportunities – usually to hilarious effect, but also unexpectedly touching on occasion: when Roya’s string of Voicemails to her Canada-based son remain unanswered, 18-year-old Goli delivers some harsh truth and our hearts hurt. In contrast, Elham’s prickly demeanour – used as a defence mechanism – brings some of the biggest LOLs.
It takes a second to work out that the actors utilise strong Farsi accents while speaking English, but adopt their natural voices when reverting to their “native tongue”. A genius device that illustrates how we hear our own voice shapes self-perception and how we come across to others.
Learning a new language affords us an opportunity to try a different persona for size and bilingual speakers often admit they feel like a different person when speaking in another language. But this play also points out an individual’s personality can be dimmed by a limited vocabulary. Shame is also associated with having a strong “foreign” accent as well, which Toossi unpacks throughout.
There’s no interval and English’s 90-minute duration absolutely flies by (unlike most ELL classes, some might say). Post-show, we find ourselves deep in thought about belonging as a crucial human need and the complex issues diaspora communities must face.
We can certainly see why a further extension to this perspective-shifting play’s season was recently announced.
English runs at MTC’s The Sumner until 31 August. Find out more here.
