Why A-List Celebs Are Lining Up To Share The Stage With Iranian Playwright Nassim Soleimanpour

In early 2013, playwright Nassim Soleimanpour found himself sitting on a bench in the park situated next to the Brisbane Powerhouse. Noticing a placard about local wildlife, he began to read. Then, unexpectedly, he started to cry. "I can remember what the sign said almost word for word: 'I'm a native bird. Please don't feed me your scraps. Help me go back to nature,'" Soleimanpour recalls. "It really struck me, in this incredibly intense, knowing way; as a playwright, what I had created was such a natural thing, I had written about my native life. And now I realised that I could easily be tempted by the 'scraps' - an expectation of confirmation, an expectation of the beautiful sound of hands clapping."

Soleimanpour's private epiphany proved to be the final chapter of an extraordinary story. The Iranian writer had been denied a passport because he had refused to do a mandatory two-year national service. Unable to leave his own country, in 2010 he wrote a uniquely devised play about his life, that could travel to the far-flung places he could not. As much by necessity as creative invention, this solo play, White Rabbit Red Rabbit, is delivered using a very specific set of instructions: without any prior rehearsal or direction, a different actor reads the script, which they find in a sealed box on stage, each evening the work is performed. The only additional request is that the actor should prepare an impression of an ostrich.

White Rabbit Red Rabbit was an immediate hit, praised for its touching humanity and sharp yet charming humour, attracting a level of international demand enjoyed by very few new plays. By 2013, it had been translated into 15 languages, and had been performed by a roll call of A-list artists including Juliet Stevenson, Ken Loach and Whoopi Goldberg (it's since been performed by Nathan Lane, Cynthia Nixon, Alan Cumming and Tony Danza, to name only a handful). The play also had one final stipulation: at every performance a seat in the front row should be reserved for Soleimanpour. For three years, that seat, in theatres all over the world, had remained empty.

But in late 2012, a medical check-up revealed that the playwright was, in fact, ineligible to perform his national service, and so with a passport finally secured, Soleimanpour travelled to Australia, to see his celebrated play for the first time. "Writing such a play, I had never seen it performed in any way before, so everything that happens in it I had only experienced in my head. Then suddenly, I saw it on stage, and there was an actor who kept saying, 'My name is Nassim Soleimanpour,'" he recounts. "So that was a trigger in a way. When someone looks you in the eye and starts to speak your own story, you can't help but have a moment when you simply think, 'This could be me. I could be an Australian, I could be female, I could be in my late 50s, I could be black or white or Chinese.' It was a very powerful moment for me. A very touching moment."

Seeing his play for the first time may have been a profoundly affecting experience for Soleimanpour, but it also revealed the work's limitations to its author. Once only able to experience the world remotely, he was now a global citizen, and this new-found freedom cast his text in an entirely new light. "When I saw it for the first time, I realised that the play was a time capsule. It's me when I was 27; I was a bachelor, I was living only in Iran. The basic facts remained the same, of course. But it was the past speaking to the future," he shares.

"One of the things my mind does, and I always feel frustrated by it, is that it tries, but never succeeds, to make complicated things simple."

The specifics of White Rabbit Red Rabbit, which continues to enjoy star-studded performances all over the world, may now be a historical record of Soleimanpour's former self, but its general architecture - an unrehearsed actor reading an unseen script to an audience - has remained the playwright's favoured methodology. Now, however, Soleimanpour is not only present for the performances of his latest work, Nassim, he's a member of the cast. There's a poetic logic to this proactive new phase in his career. Nassim in some ways can be seen as a sequel to White Rabbit Red Rabbit, as it explores more facets of the once absent protagonist's life.

But in a twist of meta-dramatic philosophising, it also reflects its theatrical nature back at itself, to muse on questions raised by the success of its predecessor. "We're still dealing with a playwright, this is still the core story of the play. However, now we're dealing with a playwright who has been translated into almost 20 languages, but not his own mother tongue," he explains. "When there's a performance of my work and people are celebrating it, of course, I'm proud and very happy that I'm there in the room. But my mum is not there, my dad is not there, my brother is not there. It's not happening in a language they can even understand. And that for me is a very sad thing."

The play also addresses the nature of language and the way communication, and our ability to understand other people, colours our subjective opinions of them. "I'm a foreigner, whose native language is Farsi, but I live in Berlin, so when I want to buy some bread, I speak in German. When I do an interview, which is work, I do it in English. When I speak to my family, it's in Farsi. So here we have someone whose soul, whose sense of self, is separated into three parts," he says. "These are common walls I think; we are separated or united by language. But this is only my experience: how language can separate me from my family or unite me with a new country. And I hope when people see the play that they feel that it is a personal story, but also that it is universal."

By his own admission, Soleimanpour is a deep thinker - "My mum is a painter and my dad is a novelist. This is the kind of home I grew up in. By the time I was 16, I'd read most of the Western philosophers" - but he has another aptitude that is equally apparent in his theatre: a keen comic instinct. It's his ability to artfully marry both the tear-jerking and the side-splitting that has seen some of the world's best comics add their names to the list of luminaries who have offered their services for an evening to Soleimanpour's plays. During its Melbourne season, Nassim will feature some of Australian comedy's finest, including The Family Law creator Benjamin Law, playwright and Black Comedy star Nakkiah Lui, stand-up stalwart Judith Lucy, and late night news host Charlie Pickering.

So, what makes comedy such an attractive resource for Soleimanpour? True to form, it's a question he's pondered long and hard. "One of the things my mind does, and I always feel frustrated by it, is that it tries, but never succeeds, to make complicated things simple. For example, I'm in love with shows that make you laugh at the beginning, wander halfway through, and by the end, make you cry. Of course, in practice, it's never that simple," he admits. "But comedy is really helpful for breaking the ice with an audience. It's like going to a party. You cannot just get there and immediately start talking very deeply about why Donald Trump is now the President of the United States. People would think, 'Oh, God, this guy is so serious.' So you have to be funny and charming. And then if you want, you can have a drink, you can dance, and then, yes, while you're smoking on the balcony, you can talk about politics. But not before. So this is where comedy, in the core of it, is very necessary for my shows."

Nassim, featuring Benjamin Law, Charlie Pickering, Nakkiah Lui, Catherine McClements and Denise Scott, plays at Arts Centre Melbourne from 28 Jan.