English review – Pulitzer-winning classroom play doesn’t quite make the grade

The instruction to speak “English only” is underlined on a board in a classroom in Karaj, Iran. The stricture pushes an immersive version of language learning on to the course’s four students, who struggle to express themselves and, more profoundly, to “be” themselves in this foreign tongue.

There is a test coming up and some feel a great pressure to pass it: Elham (Serena Manteghi) is a medical student who needs her English-language certificate for medical school in Australia; Roya (Lanna Joffrey) is a grandmother whose son has emigrated to Canada and who is desperate to connect with her grandchild. There is also Goli (Sara Hazemi), a bright-eyed teenager, and Omid (Nojan Khazai), whose reasons for being here are opaque and who is the best English speaker of the lot, including class teacher Marjan (Nadia Albina).

Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize-winning comic play offers plenty of food for thought on accents, hybrid identities, belonging and connection, as well as delicate, poetic moments. But the pace falters and there is too little drama between characters, and a lack of emotional underpinning to what seems essentially a drama of ideas. At times it feels more like a text than a play, discussing some of the same impact of language on one’s sense of self as novelist Jhumpa Lahiri’s ruminations on her immersive approach to learning Italian, In Other Words.

Under the direction of Diyan Zora, the students play language games, listen to recordings and perform role-plays. Dramatically, two kinds of English are spoken by actors, the first fluent and native to denote the moments characters speak Farsi to each other, and the second in halting, heavily Iranian-accented English for the times they are speaking in their second language. This switch is so smoothly done by the cast that we believe in it entirely.

Beyond this, there is cute, gentle comedy but with more discussion than drama, and more ideas than emotion, so we never really become invested in the relationships between students, nor do we go quite deep enough into their lives.

Roya’s frustration at the distance between her and her émigré son, both linguistic and geographic, contains great potential but nothing comes of it. There is a frisson between Marjan and Omid but the end of the romance that seems to be building is bluntly unexplored. Omid’s reason for being here, on the whole, is unconvincing. Marjan is an interesting character, having lived in Manchester for several years and hinting at being another, happier, version of herself there – renamed Mary rather than Marjan – but that snatch of story seems stranded too.

Perhaps the piece is simply offering a slice of life, with questions raised around language. It bears the quiet, intimate feel of an indie movie, although it still seems emotionally and theatrically underpowered. Maybe it is down to the size of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage, reserved for new writing, and not vast but too big for the play’s subtleties.

The most arresting scenes come in bursts of Farsi: a song that wrings the heart and a conversation between Elham and Marjan that is so full of warmth that we feel it deeply – even if we don’t speak the language we understand the meaning of their words. If only there were more such moments.