White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

Sana Nassari

Written in 2010, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has been performed in more than 30 languages, surviving, evolving, and transforming in various places, with diverse performers and audiences. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is like a message in a bottle, enduring across time and place.

Based on a Pavlovian-esque experiment, the show aims to challenge both the audience’s and the performer’s understanding of power dynamics in lateral social relationships; conformity; and the effects of accumulated history on our daily lives.

The performer, who can be anyone regardless of race, gender, age, physical appearance, or even whether they are a professional actor, faces the script, which they receive in a sealed envelope as they step onto the stage for the first and only time.

When Nassim Soleimanpour wrote the script in 2010, he was barred from obtaining a passport due to his refusal to complete the two years of compulsory military service. As a result, he created a structure in which the show can be directed remotely, if at all. For the same reason, the setting is extremely simple: two glasses of water, a small table, and a tiny container of poison. 

The cold reading begins with the author’s witty introduction and description of himself, before moving on to issue his orders – or rather, instructions – allowing for some options and choices that challenge the concepts of fate and free will, yet ultimately guiding the performer towards a potentially fatal scene.

When I saw the show at the Soho Place Theatre, starring Ben Bailey Smith, he refused to drink from the glasses in the final scene. However, a member of the theatre staff informed him that, according to Nassim’s command, he had to drink from one. The supposed free will to choose which glass felt insignificant compared to the creator’s command, which was humiliatingly enforced.

However, this wasn’t my first time watching the show. My experience in Iran was radically different. I had seen it twice before – once in a café run by social science students, and once at Kharazmi University, about a year after the 2009 Green Movement, when protests erupted nationwide in response to the rigged presidential election. The peaceful rallies were met with violent repression by militia forces, leading to tragic events, including the brutal killing of protesters and bystanders.

I remember the silence during both shows in Tehran, broken only by the audience’s anxious breathing. We were terrified, watching as an unseen author dictated a young, vulnerable man to drink poison. The presence of the small bottle, which caused laughter at Soho Place, instead filled the air with dread. We couldn’t move. To us, Iranian youth, after the 2009 protests, the unseen author manipulating the performer and audience felt like the regime’s leader, a puppet master trying to control every choice we made.

Nevertheless, I believe that Nassim knew that, like puppets, despite the will of the puppet master, performers and audiences always have their own rebellious moves that ultimately rupture the solidity of any authority or text.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit at Soho Place 1 October-9 November 2024

Sana Nassari is a British-Iranian poet, writer, translator, and art historian based in London. She has published poetry collections, a novel and a collection of short stories, These Two Roses (Exiled Writer Ink, 2020).