The Cord

Written and directed by Bijan Sheibani

Bush Theatre, London: 12 April – 25 May 2024 

Review by Oladipo Agboluaje

Bijan Sheibani has a big reputation as a director. Plays he has directed include Inua Ellams’ Barbershop Chronicles (2017/2020), which toured nationally and internationally to great acclaim, and the London premiere of The Brothers Size (2018) by African American writer Tarell Alvin McCraney. Now, Sheibani has turned his hand to writing for both stage and television. His debut play, The Arrival (2019), directed by himself, played at the Bush Theatre to strong reviews. It told the story of two British-Iranian brothers reuniting after decades of separation. The Arrival was a taut 70 minutes, with a strong physical storytelling element guided by movement director Aline David, who also collaborated with Sheibani on Barbershop Chronicles and now on The Cord. Conflict in The Arrival emanated from the differences in the upbringing of the two brothers. In The Cord, Sheibani interrogates familial conflict of a different kind, between husband and wife after the birth of their first child.

Sheibani brings a similar tautness to The Cord, both in the writing and directing. Physical storytelling is employed, although not to the same extent as in his debut play. The dramatic narrative is structured in short scenes over 70 minutes without an interval. The stage is a carpeted raised square, expressing the play’s domestic setting, while overhead is a square light that dims and brightens, tracking the characters’ emotions as the play progresses. The three actors sit on chairs stationed at corners of the stage and are on view throughout the drama. They act as observers of the events in the scenes they are not participants in rather than as performers waiting their turn to take to the stage. In the fourth corner sits a cellist (Colin Alexander), who adds a musical accompaniment to the dramatic proceedings. 

Ash (played by Irfan Shamji) anchors the play as the new father who is not coping too well with the birth of his son. At first played as a gentle soul, the rage within soon emanates in angry outbursts and, albeit unintentionally, a moment of violence. Ash traces his feeling of exclusion from his nuclear family to his relationship with his mother, Jane (Lucy Black), who suffers from an unnamed pain. In several scenes, Ash sees the actions of his wife Anya (Eileen O’Higgins) as deliberately alienating him and his parents from her and their baby Louis. In one scene, Jane admonishes Ash for wanting to be the centre of attention, and for his inability to realise that life must change to accommodate little Louis. 

There are strong performances from the cast. Black plays Jane as a commonsensical matriarch who understands and accepts the post-natal trials that her daughter-in-law is experiencing and tries to make Ash understand them. O’Higgins switches from sweetness to fury in portraying Anya’s attempts to provide for her own physical and mental needs and those of her child whilst dealing with Ash’s outbursts. The two women more or less serve Ash’s story. Nevertheless, they are strong stage presences. 

The Cord is a powerfully emotional journey of umbilical connection, muted suffering and uncontrollable outburst that both embodies and raises questions about family, masculinity, motherhood and family trauma. 

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/the-cord