Under the Shadows review – Leila Farzad is fantastic in this 80s Tehran story | Section

Shideh, a former medical student in Tehran, was criticized for wearing her headscarf so badly, it was warned: “A woman should be more afraid of revealing herself than anything else.”

Shideh has other concerns. It’s 1988, when the Iran-Iraq war is at its peak, and her husband is on the front line, leaving her to raise their seven-year-old daughter. Shideh’s ambitions to become a doctor were thwarted due to accusations that he was involved in politics during the Iranian revolution. There are also air travel that they fight against. More dangerous than any bomb, I hope that the djinn – an evil spirit – can eat his family.

Adoption 2016 movie by Babak AnvariCarmen Nasr’s taut transformation may not last long. When Shideh and his neighbors tie each other up in bomb shelters, cursing Europe and the US for abandoning them, this could be the beginning of 2026.

But the strength of Nadia Latif’s suspenseful, fluidly directed production is in its interlocking relationship between action and metaphor. Even if we interpret the djinn as a manifestation of Shideh’s inner anger from her repressed life, this does not make it dangerous – as proven by the nervous jump at the end of one episode.

The play is dominated by Ben Stones’ loving script: a large living room with mustard yellow walls, lots of chairs and an inaccessible space, and a TV in the corner playing Jane Fonda’s workout tapes on a disturbing VCR. Donato Wharton’s sound design, with its electric edge, adds to the tension, while James Farncombe’s lighting helps to define the bomb shelter, the sunken area in front of the stage, and feeds the atmosphere of melancholy and danger.

The relationships between Shideh’s neighbors, whether fragile or warlike (“Let’s live without Saddam!” says one), provide the background for the play. Leila Farzad he naturally creates a lot of interest, his immobility that Shideh is driving. There’s real flavor, too, in his maps of Shideh’s ruins. In its dramatic finale, a new self-expression is called for, nothing to do with mascara on the head but a clear creation between a mother and her daughter that leaves them armed for the future.