Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: In Two Minds / My English Persian Kitchen

In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ 

Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.

Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically convenient but slightly implausible set-up. But put that to one side and it’s a tenderly conceived, convincingly written examination of daughterly duty, motherly responsibility, and quietly fragmenting minds. Like her unnamed Mother and Daughter themselves, Ryan rarely addresses issues of mental health head-on. They might happen right in front of us, but Ryan prods and challenges us to decide how seriously we should take them, whether it’s time to act, and when it’s time to act, as Mother’s steadily deteriorating condition threatens her daughter’s precarious work, relationship and own mental stability.

Pom Boyd and Karen McCartney deliver convincing, naturalistic and chillingly matter-of-fact performances as Mother and Daughter, their fragile relationship conveyed through increasingly dark, sometimes bitter exchanges. Daughter McCartney is perhaps a little too patient with her Mother’s increasingly extreme moods and demands – there’s a suggestion that she’s experienced them before, but Ryan doesn’t explore that earlier history in detail. Boyd, on the other hand, is both horrifying and pitiful as Mother, her disturbing behaviour seeming both natural and somehow inevitable.

It's a slow-moving production from director Sarah Jane Scaife that allows time and space for consideration of its themes, and of its individual events, barbed comments and fraught exchanges, and one whose gradually accumulating power is all the stronger since its tensions and conflicts are so carefully repressed. It’s a cathartic 80 minutes of theatre, one that offers no easy answers, but encourages us instead to face up more directly to the questions.

• Until 25 August

My English Persian Kitchen, Traverse Theatre ★★★ 

It begins almost as a live cookery show. Chop the herbs finely – parsley, mint, dill, chives, plus onions, saffron and garlic. Mix sour cream and feta to approximate authentically Iranian yoghurt. All the while with the smells and sounds of Persian cuisine drifting from the stage into the audience.

But tougher questions soon intrude on this culinary idyll in Hannah Khalil’s solo play, based on the experiences of Shiraz-born cook and writer Atoosa Sepehr. This is a story of an abusive marriage, a flight from Iran, and a new settling in London that’s at first unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It’s a new home in which cherished flavours evoke a sense of belonging, as well as memories of the dark past – and beloved friends and family – that the protagonist has left behind forever.

There are big questions of migration, community and home hovering behind Khalil’s often lyrical creation, though they’re somewhat overshadowed by its central on-stage cooking conceit. It’s a neat and compelling device, as well as one that provides a neat selling point among the many gimmicks elsewhere in the Fringe. And the show’s aromas certainly add an additional level of mouthwatering vividness to Khalil’s already powerful storytelling. But her twin themes of autobiography and cuisine remain rather more separate than they might have been, with the result that My English Persian Kitchen feels more like a play with cookery, less like a play in which drama and cooking are inextricably linked.

All the same, Isabella Nefar (pictured above, by Ellie Kurttz) makes for a compelling protagonist, and she’s able to switch effortlessly between eager cook spilling the secrets of her cherished cuisine, and damaged migrant remembering an early life of fear, violence and oppression. Chris White’s fluid direction brings both story arcs alive, but also serves to maintain their distance from each other.

Nonetheless, My English Persian Kitchen is an enjoyable, revealing show with an unusual and largely successful premise. And does that big pot of soup that Nefar so carefully prepares go to waste? No, it does not. 

• Until 25 August

• The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 26 August 
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