Catching History on the Fly in Javaad Alipoor’s Trilogy

Since 2016, I’ve written, directed, and performed in a trilogy of shows: The Believers are but Brothers, Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. 

The trilogy interrogates how everyday technology, global politics, and fracturing identities are changing our world. The shows used theatre, documentary style research, and moments of interactivity. They’ve grown and twisted in scale, moving from a (sort of) solo show to a two-hander to a mid-scale piece with a lot of live music.  But they all speak to that fundamental thought.

The Believers are but Brothers was a one(ish) man show that used a post-documentary theatre style in combination with a WhatsApp group that immersed the audience in the world of the story. It was about young men who join ISIS and the alt-right, masculinity, politics, and gaming culture. 

Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran was a two-hander, combining two performers, projection, and a live Instagram account to tell a story about the obnoxious lifestyles of the kids of the Iranian elite. It won The Javaad Alipoor Company’s second Fringe First Award and transferred to Manchester before slamming into the global events of 2020 whereupon it became a live/digital hybrid experience. It ended up touring the world online. 

The final part, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, tied some of these strands together. At its heart it’s a deep dive into the life, context, and murder of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a 1970s cultural icon, who I often describe as the Iranian Tom Jones. But it’s also a deep dive into the idea of a deep dive, particularly in the digital world. It uses a send-up of murder mystery podcasting, an analysis of data-driven technology, and post-colonial theory to think about the limits of the kind of thinking and living that lies at the heart of the whole trilogy: the way a certain kind of online life has maimed and limited the possibilities of thought and human imagination. 

The debate we've been caught up in has been about whether technology is taking us to utopia or dystopia, a debate powered by the idea that technology is an agent of change. But that sense of agency has all but vanished.

I want to take this moment to think about what has happened in the past decade since I began writing the trilogy. It’s a period where the promises of digital technology and internet culture have proven to be nearly entirely illusory. The debate we've been caught up in has been about whether technology is taking us to utopia or dystopia, a debate powered by the idea that technology is an agent of change. But that sense of agency has all but vanished. In a way, the increasingly excited discussion about things like artificial intelligence (AI) masks the truth: the period of digital technology-powered change is over, the tech giants are tired, and the internet is basically dead. 

Interestingly, across the same period I would argue that the in real life (IRL) world has found a way to smash back through the computer screen—the restatement of an embodied and corporeal politics of physical space. And so, as a theatremaker who has spent the past decade exploring digital technology and internet culture on stage, where do we go next? What would the trilogy be if I began writing it afresh today?

Going Back to the Beginning

When I started writing this trilogy in 2016 my working life was split between three things. I was just starting to make professional touring work, but I was still doing a lot of community work and engaged in political activism around the Arab Spring and anti-racism in the United Kingdom. 

Thinking about the Arab Spring had profoundly shifted how I saw myself and the world politically, especially in the case of Syria. I grew as a leftist through the years of the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. A critique of what we saw as Western imperialism and wars of conquest was a foundational building block of the way I saw the world. But the Syrian revolution turned this on its head.

In the early years of the war, I remember seeing the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian National Council (SNC) calling on, even begging, the Western powers, especially the United States and United Kingdom, for access to the kind of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) that could down regime helicopters. This was before the Russians had joined, so the only real strategic lead the regime had over the revolutionaries was the airpower that came from dropping primitive bombs from helicopters. The FSA and the SNC were convinced that with these SAMs they would finish the regime.

Both the Obama and Cameron administrations refused to provide such weaponry.  A lot of us ended up in the novel position of trying to amplify voices calling for Western powers to intervene more in a war in the Middle East—in this case by sending the weapons. 

And then something even weirder happened.  All around the world large sections of the global left lined up behind the Assad regime as it drowned the democratic aspirations of the people in their own blood. 
This was a large part of what drove me into the first part of this trilogy: the investigation of the peculiar parallels between the terminally online forms of propaganda used by ISIS and the alt-right and what it revealed about this process. 

Over the life of this trilogy, that process has accelerated dramatically.  These processes that began at the margins have conquered the mainstream.

When I opened The Believers are but Brothers in 2017, taking an audience into a world where websites targeting young men were feeding into the far right and Islamic extremism, or where the gamification of politics was being paralleled by a rightwards radicalization of a generation of young computer gamers, felt like taking people into a world they didn’t know. But just like the fracturing of the old identities of left and right, this is a truth that people have come to live with.

Rich Kids… and the Pandemic

But if the way that social media seemed to be dragging us all into a politics and life that existed solely online, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that a different force was acting on us.

Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran started out as a live play . The idea was to explore some of the same ideas that had come up in the making of Believers but from a different angle: resentment as a personal and political motivating force, the way that the rich pixelation of the digital screen seems to make our fantasies seem tastable, the way that the organization of our personal lives on social media seemed to shape the possibility of how we think about social and historical change.

It opened at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 and transferred to HOME Manchester ahead of a run at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), then onto what we hoped, like Believers, would be a world tour. But then those plans slammed headfirst into the pandemic.  

We were lucky that our partners at BAC were keen for us to share a digital version of the show and supported us in trying to find a way to both support the original company of artists who made it and share it with audiences thirsty for some kind of theatre.

The digital adaptation of the show opened in late 2020 on BAC’s website. It found its audience and captured the imaginations of a really hungry section of people who wanted to engage with something genuinely theatrical in lockdown conditions. 

The online version of the show functioned as a fusion of a Zoom performance and Instagram live content. It happened live, but online, in the sense that the show was performed online, and through the Instagram live content audience members could see that they were watching along at the same time as other people.

One of the things that really resonated with audiences was the feeling that they were watching a work that was genuinely live. The pandemic had been full of opportunity to watch incredible recorded and captured work. Organizations from the National Theatre to the Schaubühne were putting huge amounts of their back catalogue online. But none of these shows scratched the basic itch of live performance. In reimagining Rich Kids as a standalone digital work, we hit on something really timely—a show that was always partially about the nature of history and our relationship to it, as well as being digital yet fundamentally live.

In some ways this tracked with what was going on with the internet at the time. Through the height of the pandemic people were using social media in a surprising way. To be clear, exactly at the moment when we were mostly locked in our houses and susceptible to a mushroom technology designed to flourish in the dankness of social isolation, our engagement with it fell. Facebook started reporting a falling user base.

The ostensibly growing ranks of YouTube and TikTok consumers were engaging less deeply, for less and less time every day.

Something different was going on.

I think part of this is to do with the nature of the pandemic. Ultimately a virus is a physical thing, exploding back into a world that had fooled itself into thinking that the physical was escapable. I’m not the first person to compare the promise of the digital screen to a gnostic soteriology. Porn is sexuality shorn of the real and messy choreography of actual sex, just like a jihadi video or a violent computer game gives you the payoff of violence without your (stupid, weak, cowardly) body being on the line.  There is the promise of a two-dimensional world where things actually make sense and hang together. But real, physical matter will keep breaking through. Sometimes there just is a virus. And deep in all our psyches, I think this became much clearer.

And as we came out of the emergency phase of the pandemic, huge global forces, both political and economic, were eroding the financial building materials that were plugging gaps in the story we told ourselves about what social media can do.  

The Final Part of the Trilogy

As I started work on the final part of the trilogy, many of the online phenomena that we had unearthed through the process had moved into the mainstream. And at the same time, the return of the real world was accelerating. 

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World was in week two of rehearsals when news of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran broke out. At the heart of the show was an investigation into how data science and the way internet structures the act of “research” can trick us into thinking we have grasped how to relate to othered peoples, when in fact they keep us more isolated. 

And there, right in the middle of rehearsals, we were met with one of the most profound examples of the end of the period in which social media was defining a new reality.  A central reality of Woman, Life, Freedom was that the movement was specifically not organized around the online space, especially its most successful parts. Whilst sharing videos of women removing their hijab, especially celebrities, was an important part of galvanizing the early movement, the most radical and effective changes in Iranian society have been about how people have organized in physical space. To this day, large numbers of women simply refuse to wear hijab in public spaces. Sometimes they pay a terrible prince for this. But they retain their freedom precisely insofar as they are not caught by digital technology. 

A part of this movement found its way into Things Hidden. The final part of the trilogy ended by exploding the technological bonds that we imagine tie together large scale international political change and asking us to consider the radical, dizzying sense of freedom of engaging with the overwhelming sense of difference and internationalism that meets us whenever we walk through a modern city. 

In this way, the trilogy follows the arc of the decade of social media: from the period where we didn’t know what it revealed, through the sense of its possibilities constricting, to a time when it feels like the most interesting things are happening offline. 

Writing About History as It’s Happening

The trilogy has met people all over the world, with audience numbers that are a real privilege to anyone who wants their work to shape conversations and change how people think about their world. Its constituent parts have been adapted for television, played at festivals and arts venues all over the world, and written about in newspapers, academic journals, and activist blogs. I’m honored and proud to have been part of an incredible team of artists who met a historical moment and found a compelling, emotionally resonant and intellectually exhilarating way to interrogate it.

In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges describes the eponymous fictional author as an artist who is trying to repeat a previous work. Menard wants to write Don Quixote, not from memory or as a copy, but by somehow immersing himself so much in Cervantes’s writing that he can just write it exactly as Cervantes wrote it. To do so the fictional early twentieth century author considers and rejects a number of tactics: “The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turks, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.”

I love this line. I think it’s a particularly droll and playful way of explaining the difference between looking back at something and working through it as it happens.

If I was to sit down and try and write the trilogy today, I would be writing a history in a very different way; I would be looking back at the recent past already aware of what possibilities were open and what has been closed down. That would make for a very different kind of show. It would feel like a piece of work that functioned less as a warning of what was being born, and more as the tracing of lines of flight; less as a way of showing our complicity in things we think (or thought) as only tangentially connected to us. It would be something written in a fundamentally even darker time; its sense of satire would have to be much more vicious.

But at the same time, it would need to reckon with the liberation of Syria from the rule of Bashar al Assad. As I gestured at above, the descent of the revolutions of the Arab Spring into war, something accelerated as an active strategy by the Assad regime (and indeed its abandonment by the West and international progressive opinion), was one of the big drivers of the ideas at the heart of this trilogy. 

In an almost miraculous thirteen-day campaign, Syrian rebels have recently triumphed. A version of this trilogy written today would end with one arc that moves through the closing of the same possibilities around digital technology as an agent of change, but also with a counter arc that culminates in the re-establishment of more traditional and corporeal politics as the real motive force in the struggle for freedom.

In these two fundamental ways, the historical moment that birthed the trilogy is over. But the work certainly still speaks to people; it’s currently hosted on Digital Theatre and parts of it still tour.

The form of theatre that survives through the twenty-first century will find new ways to intersect with the accelerating pace of change.  It will make art from the alchemy of this interaction. 

There is an old joke that the difference between classical comedy and tragedy is simply where you choose to end the story. But the matter of political art is about social structures, human experience, and history—and none of these things ever end, however much we might want them to. One thing I am certain of though is this: the form of theatre that survives through the twenty-first century will be that which finds new ways to intersect with the accelerating pace of change. It will make its art from the alchemy of this interaction.