By Nazanine Nouri
“My English Persian Kitchen” – a play in which a young woman cooks ‘Ash Reshteh,’ a tasty noodle soup, live on stage – is returning to London’s prestigious Soho Theatre after a sold-out run last year.
Based on a book by Atossa Sepehr, the play has been written by the award-winning playwright Hannah Khalil. A one-woman show, it tells the true story of Sepehr: an Iranian woman who flees her homeland to escape domestic violence. The setting is a kitchen counter where the real-time cooking takes place. The play was also performed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe) last year.
The 70-minute production is “a thoroughly flavorful feast of a play that transports its audiences, through its aromatic delights, into an Iranian kitchen,” wrote the Guardian in its review, adding that “live cooking” would “marinate the theatre in the distinct fragrances of Persian noodle soup – ‘Ash-e Reshteh’ – made from Sepehr’s recipe.”
Inspired by Sepehr’s life, the actress Isabella Nefar skillfully evokes past and present using the medium of cooking, and transports spectators to the streets of Tehran via a live cooking demonstration. (Nefar is an Iranian-Italian actor based in London, who starred in “Reading Lolita in Tehran” in 2024.)
Sepehr now lives and works as a nutritional therapist in Belfast. She never thought her story would find its place on stage one day, and hopes that theatergoers will find comfort in it, knowing that even in the darkest of moments in life, nothing lasts forever.
“We can always give up and let the universe or others make a plan,” she told the Guardian on the occasion of the play’s Soho Theatre debut in 2024. “Or you can do something about it and make the change yourself. Food is a language of its own and transcends borders.”
Sepehr was born in Shiraz in 1977 and grew up in Isfahan. Her father was an engineer and her mother, a great cook with a real passion for food who traveled to different places outside Isfahan to find the right ingredients.
After obtaining a degree in computer science, she married one of her university classmates at 27, but the marriage turned sour and she could not divorce without her husband’s consent. By then, she had completed her MBA and started her own import/export business, representing one of the biggest Iranian steel companies in London. She quietly arranged to be transferred to their London office before breaking the news to her husband, who quickly became abusive and threatened to revoke her passport.
With the help of her parents, who had taken her back to the family home in Isfahan, she returned to Tehran and left for London literally overnight. The next morning, her father received a phone call confirming that she had been banned from leaving the country.
Sepehr arrived in the UK in December 2007 to start a new life in a foreign land at the age of 30. Living alone in a flat in north London, she tried to make up for her loneliness by cooking, as it reminded her of the home she had left behind.
“Cooking was the one thing that gave me comfort, a sense of getting back to life,” she told the Guardian. “It was calming and giving me focus.”
“As soon as you start cooking, it takes you back,” she added. “It starts with the smell, then eating it, remembering the gatherings around it. Food hasn’t got a language; you can take it anywhere. It doesn’t need to be interpreted.”
She began recreating her family recipes, calling her mother, grandmother and aunt in the process until she had perfected the dishes.
“I was killing myself to get each one right – phoning them up and making one dish 20 times to get exactly what I was used to,” she said in a previous interview with the Guardian, published in September 2018. “It’s hard to put into words, but I was missing home and those tastes, when I got them right, were taking me back – like hearing music that you listened to long ago.”
Her divorce would be finalized after more than four years. By then Sepehr had given up her job in the import-export business and cooking had taken over her life.
She spent three years perfecting the family recipes, styling the dishes and taking photos, and in 2018, those recipes became part of her first book – “From a Persian Kitchen.”
For the playwright Hannah Khalil, food was a bridge back to Atossa’s family in Iran and one that brought her to the UK and created a community for her here. Khalil herself was born to a Palestinian father and a British mother and grew up in Dubai before moving back to the UK following her parents’ divorce. She felt her heritage and upbringing bolstered her understanding of Sepehr’s story.
“I realized once I started talking to Atossa that the story’s not about Iran,” she told the Guardian. “It’s about how you start again, build from nothing again as a woman. That’s my mum’s story. My father didn’t really talk to me about politics or Palestine. My main connection to my heritage is food, he cooked and taught me those dishes.”
Khalil is currently Writer in Residence at Bristol Old Vic and an Associate Artist at Shakespeare’s Globe. She was also the 2022 Resident Writer at Shakespeare’s Globe.
