By Nazanine Nouri
London’s prestigious Almeida Theater is presenting the stage adaptation of “Under the Shadow” — an awardwinning 2016 horror movie by the British-Iranian writer-director Babak Anvari. The play runs through July 4.
Anvari’s film, set in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, is the story of Shideh and her husband, a doctor who is conscripted and sent to the front. It won the 2017 BAFTA Film Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, and the 2016 British Independent Film Award for Best Screenplay.
The play, set in an apartment in Tehran, shows Shideh (Leila Farzad) – a doctor who cannot practice medicine due to repressive state laws — sheltering at home with her terrified young daughter while Tehran is bombed and her husband is on the battlefield.
Shideh prefers to stay home with their daughter Dorsa even after a missile strikes their building. Dorsa is afraid of demonic djinns. Shiva reads up about djinns and discovers that there is an evil spirit in the apartment.
“Under the Shadow” is an exploration of the boundaries between the rational and the irrational. The characters are also torn between leaving Iran or staying there.
The stage adaptation is written by Carmen Nasr and directed by Nadia Latif. Like the film, the play addresses the powerful role of women in Iranian society.
“Babak made a film about an incredible female character,” Latif told the Financial Times in a recent interview. “But hand it over to a female writer and a female director, and they’re obviously going to push it in a whole other direction.”
Latif, who grew up in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, said she hoped that the production would convey the reality of war to those who had never experienced it: an existence “which to the average audience member at the Almeida is completely unthinkable – to live where a missile can come through your roof. Literally any second of the day.”
Shideh’s dilemma about whether to stay or to leave is a familiar one for Latif, but also for Nasr and Farzad. Farzad was born to Iranian parents in the United Kingdom, while Carmen Nasr is of Lebanese-Scottish descent.
Latif moved to the U.K. at the age of 14, and later studied at University College London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She has worked in both theater and film. Her first feature film “The Man in My Basement” was released last year, and starred the American actor Willem Dafoe.
