M y biggest mistake of the Edinburgh fringe wasn’t mixing up its many venues, or underestimating the time to hotfoot between them. It was arriving at My English Persian Kitchen (Traverse, ★★★★) on an empty stomach. I regretted it as soon as I saw Isabella Nefar chopping and perfuming the air with onion, garlic and heady herbs.
Food transports you. Not always to places you want to go. As a woman prepares her beloved Iranian dish ash reshteh , she is ambushed by memories of the home she left to flee an abusive relationship.
Recipe instructions such as “focus” and “timing is everything” become an escape plan, as she races to get out of the country before her partner cancels her passport. Hannah Khalil’s script skims over the detail of this real woman’s story, and some of Nefar’s reactions are slightly overcooked, including a hallucinatory sequence involving one of the kitchen knives. But her performance is gripping and dynamic.
She rises on a stool like the steam out of the pan in front of her. And her scampering around the audience to offer whiffs of spices suggests a history of being on the run. “May your soul be replenished,” she wishes us, before serving up the soup.
There’s a different kind of prep on display in Rob Madge’s musical My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?) (Underbelly, ★★★). Much of the work was done decades ago; the show is structured on home video footage of performances Madge made as a child: a parade of Disney chara.