‘Hearing’

In the girls’ dormitory at an Iranian university, a man’s voice is heard. That’s the starting point of Hearing, a penetrating new piece by Amir Reza Koohestani. The Iranian theatre maker drags us into a Kafkaesque labyrinth of rumours and insinuations, where fragments of text and video flow through each other and increasingly blur the boundary between fact and figment. The narrative complexity is further brought to a head by the alternating of text and camera images. The women are determined and unyielding. They want to shed the stifling social conventions, but are trapped in an oppressive system. Their opposition is subtle but no less poignant for it. The spectre of the surveillance society haunts the space. The script is layered and razor-sharp and the direction sober and subdued, as we are accustomed to with Koohestani. Hearing is a compelling meditation on elusive threat and absence. Will the truth surface?