30 Bird Productions - Plastic
August 14th, 2008
We recently finished the music to a piece of theatre entitled ‘Plastic’ by Mehrdad Seyf, which looks at an increasingly bizarre twist of fate that sees the government and religious order in Iran sanctioning sex change operations in order to ‘cleanse’ their society. ‘Plastic’ runs until the end of August in the Pleasance Underground at the Edinburgh Festival, a 4 star review published in the Guardian appears below.
‘Plastic’ - Guardian Review
In a Fringe drowning in docudrama and real-life stories, it’s good to discover a piece of theatre that makes a political point without ever being mundane.
Plastic, a slick, stylish 55 minutes from Mehrdad Seyf and the Anglo-Iranian company 30 Bird Productions, meditates on many things without settling conveniently on one. It touches on consumerism as well as oppression and surveillance, hinting at the vacuousness of a society where every last thing can be reinvented or thrown away. Most of all it suggests the commodification and manipulation of women, whether through Botox or the diktats of Iran’s Islamic state.
The journey through these ideas is literal enough, a walking tour through the catacombs underneath the Pleasance conducted by women clad in white: surgical technicians, perhaps, though they might as easily be Zara salespeople. You’re segregated by gender, women on one side of a wall, men on the other, one minute listening to misogynistic pop songs being taken apart, the next watching video of an actor winding her torso into an endless skein of bandage. Two of the cast slide off their high heels and perform an awkward, angular dance barefoot on the stone floor; a few minutes later, in a separate part of the complex, a woman hurries anxiously between glass jars, compulsively placing a stiletto in each.
This piece is as much a series of stills as a work of theatre, a succession of stylised vignettes whose relationship remains teasing and enigmatic. But what Plastic loses in narrative energy it gains through the haunting power of its images: a family dinner table weirdly lacking guests, a set of rollerblinds in a perky Cath Kidston print forming a sort of prison cell.
And while its political logic could be accused of lacking subtlety, it evokes with discomfiting immediacy a society from which pleasure has been surgically removed.
Reviewed by Andrew Dickson
Plastic photo by Eamonn McGoldrick
