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NLatif’s grandfather warned him about the djinn. “If angels are good and demons are bad,” the theater and film director recalls learning, “then the djinn is something in between.” As a child, he asked his grandmother what this meant. He was told: “It means that bad things happen to good people.” Carmen Nasr’s stage adaptation of Babak Anvari’s 2016 Iranian horror film, djinn-haunted. Under the ShadeLatif has installed an evil protective eye to watch over the room. He said: “In that case.
The Bafta-winning horror film in Farsi – performed on stage in English – is set in Tehran in 1988 as Iraq fires missiles across the border, the shadow of Iran’s 1979 revolution still weighing heavily on the world. Shideh, played in the film by Narges Rashidi, hides in her house with her daughter who hugs her, who is scared when the story starts to cause political panic. Horror and reality collide when a ghostly creature becomes visible in their home: rumors become real, night visions and chances of escape diminish. “It’s the beginning of a lot of Persian dialogue,” says British Iranian Leila Farzad, who follows her role as a knowledge-hungry student in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia by playing Shideh on stage. “In the past Revolution or after change. Even after 47 years, it is something that is talked about a lot. Enkelab, The word Revolution is one of the first words you hear as an Iranian child. “
We meet Shideh in afterwhen he is about to break down. Opted out of medical education due to politics during the revolution, while her husband, a doctor, is sent to the front, Shideh walks through a strange war of constant fear and death of civilians, on top of the troubling feelings of uncertainty about motherhood. “Babak came to practice one day,” says Farzad, “and I said that sometimes I feel the emotion of Shideh’s words to her daughter.” After setting records for his growth, clarity and war, Anvari told him not to stop. “He said, ‘That was my mother trying to cope.
This issue has changed with world politics. When the show first aired in 2022, it was, Latif says, “in fact, a response to change for women in Iran.” At the time he went up, two years ago, “it seemed to be responding to the Palestinians”. When asked recently why the drama was so important, he was surprised. “I was like: What do you know about British involvement in this situation? This is your profile. It has never been necessary. “
Anger and despair run through Nasr’s writing, as the djinn living in Shideh’s house combines the horrors of daily warfare, while he tries to pass the hours by watching his illegal Jane Fonda videos. Shideh’s situation is “impossible and boring and dangerous”, says Nasr – whose new play, Samira, is in the upcoming season at the National. Theater – “and it looks like the world is conspiring.” A lot of times, being in the Middle East, you feel like the world is conspiring.”
The conversations between Latif, Farzad and Nasr are fast-paced, jumping across continents as they share stories about their families and Shideh, who must choose to stay or leave. Latif talks about his family’s experiences in Sudan, while Farzad talks about his own in Iran. Farzad says: “There are respectable people living there. “My grandfather didn’t want to leave, but all his brothers left.” Nasr talks about his Lebanese family. He said: “My father left and came back in the 90s, and I came back together. The three also talk about Palestine, about families uprooted from their land who take their keys with the hope that one day they will return.
The main group of the show consists of families spread across the world map. Nasr mentioned Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese and Sudanese, adding: “Everyone in the room we are working with knows about that hope.” He talks about the solidarity he feels with the Iranian people, as someone from Lebanon. “Of course,” Farzad nods in understanding. “We are neighbors.” Although Anvari’s story is about one woman in one country that was conquered by one war, a great parallel can be found in Shideh’s fear and determination to survive. “A lot of things that people are hearing now,” says Latif, “are given form in this play.”
Looking at the eerie scenes of creeping shadows and disappearing figures, Nasr believes this is a play for people who “don’t fear”. These brands have been gaining momentum in recent years, and Paranormal Activity making a phone call about how to scare the audience. As it is, Nasr’s transformation raises the question of how to translate the horror of cinema into something that can be recreated night after night. “You can’t just throw a film on the stage,” says Nasr. “We were like: How do you make this into a sports event?” In some ways, danger is easier on stage than on screen, says Latif. He said: “In movies, people are drawn to fantasy. “In theaters, it’s fantasy. Is it easy to be like that ghost?”
These three are prone to love horror movies. Latif is very passionate. “Horror movies are a very democratic art because they’re trying to scare everybody,” he says. He saw Beneath the Shadow twice in the cinema after it came out, and he taught at a film school during the pandemic, using it as a model for creating large-scale cultural works. He said: “In many ways it’s a classic horror story about a woman trapped in a house where something spreads.” But it is no different from what happened in Tehran in 1988. After correcting its dire form, 2025 The Man In My Basementhe wanted to explain what he had learned.
Nasr sits somewhere in the middle of horror-fandom, preferring the psychodrama end of the scale, while Farzad doesn’t take the genre very well. It took him four rounds to complete the film for the play, and when the team went to see it The Black Woman as an investigation, he was so scared that he accidentally pushed a woman next to him. But, Farzad says, he sees a unique power that makes politics personal.
The domestic setting of Under the Shadow allows the audience to understand the impact of war up close. “An ongoing question in my work is about collective and individual suffering,” says Latif, “and why we can understand it on an individual level but not on a larger scale.” He talks about watching the current war on Iran on our phones; its distance. Farzad said: “I see my 11-year-old son watching the news in Iran, and it doesn’t spread because it’s statistics.” By writing politics in a fictional story, this will allow us not only to see a dusty house in a war zone, but “to enter the kitchen of a house in this house”, says Farzad, “and look face to face with a woman who is facing the war”.
Crews are knocking on the door now for rehearsals to begin, and Latif admits he doesn’t know how the show will end. The script has been written, but the tone is not yet certain. “Do you leave people with hope?” he asks. “I think hope is precious, but hope is also painful. The irony for the Iranian people is that they have been waiting for almost 50 years.”
On the floor Shadow and to Almeida theaterLondon, June 2 on the 4th of July.
