When the Iran-born cookery book author Atoosa Sepehr first met Hannah Khalil, the playwright tasked with bringing her life to the London stage, the women found plenty of common ground. But there was one thing, above all, that bonded the two: “We spent most of the time talking about food,” says Khalil. The pair are joining me on a video call as their play – inspired by Sepehr’s journey from Iran to Britain and the cooking from home that helped her plant new roots – enters its first week of rehearsals.
In fact, it was over a Zoom call in 2021 that they had that first meeting. Soho theatre’s David Luff had read Sepehr s in 2007 to escape her bad marriage, in the Guardian. With a husband unprepared to grant her a divorce, and without the power to obtain one herself, she left almost overnight, with just an hour’s window before he would block the documents that would allow her to leave the country.
Once in the UK, alone in a north London flat and missing home, she called the women in her family in Iran, and began painstakingly recreating the recipes she was raised on, devoting four years to perfecting the dishes of old Persia. It delivered purpose and community as her neighbours were spellbound by the smells emanating from her small kitchen. Then came a bestselling cookbook, , after Sepehr gave up work in the import-export business that had sponsored her move, in order to turn her recipes into something lasting.
Luff knew that this story of crossing borders, and food .