'White Rabbit Red Rabbit' review – catch this daring, one-off theatrical experience while you can

Read our review of White Rabbit Red Rabbit, starring numerous celebrities across its run including Lenny Henry, Catherine Tate, and Olly Alexander, now in performances at Soho Place to 9 November.

The play I’m reviewing here is not the one you’ll see if you book for this latest revival of White Rabbit Red Rabbit. How can it be, when the show famously has a different actor performing every night and no one steering the production from the director’s chair?

That’s part of the magic of Nassim Soleimanpour’s 2011 play: each performance is a daring, one-off theatrical experience that relies on its sole actor not having read the script beforehand – and the audience (and reviewers) not giving away its secrets. It’s a thrilling piece of experimental theatre with the potential to burrow down an infinite number of interpretive holes each time it’s performed.

On press night, it’s actor-comedian and Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed who strides onto the stage, met by conspiratorial, expectant cheers from the audience. He furrows his brow performatively before launching into a script designed to tease and ridicule whoever’s hand it is in, as well as challenging them to think on their feet.

Over the next 65 minutes, we watch him interact with pre-placed props and rope in audience members while delivering a text that, through allegory and a recurring motif involving the titular rabbits, explores obedience and control.

While the story on the page is top secret, the one behind Soleimanpour’s first ‘cold-read play’ – a formula he’s expanded on in subsequent works – is now legend: he wrote it from Iran, his birth country, while refusing to do the compulsory two-year military service that would have granted him a passport.

It’s since been translated into more than 30 languages, performed at 235 theatres (as well as in classrooms, prisons and war bunkers), and by over 3,000 actors – many of whom are celebrities. Whoopi Goldberg, Cynthia Nixon and Nathan Lane are among a number of household names who have given it a go.

And a big part of the appeal of catching a performance is watching your celebrity of choice be put on the spot, tackling the play’s material in real time – and, arguably, living out every actor’s nightmare of appearing on stage having not learned their lines.

Among the 46-strong line-up performing in this current West End run are national treasures Michael Sheen, Lenny Henry and Catherine Tate, as well as rising stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Olly Alexander and Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd. How will they take to it? Only those watching on the night will know.

White Rabbit Red Rabbit is protest theatre, but Soleimanpour’s script employs classic Brechtian ‘spass’ to balance dark with light. Intimidation techniques are masked as games, and people are substituted for animals to lend their plight a sense of whimsy.

Mohammed nails both the humour and the sorrow. He takes the script at a lick, for the most part, but when one anecdote takes a particularly dark turn, he falls silent and walks for several paces against the slowly rotating stage, giving the revelation a moment to fully resonate.

Tomorrow night’s actor will respond differently, as will whoever who picks up the envelope after them, and the actors who bravely sign up to future revivals in years to come. It’s a cleverly timeless piece, echoing authoritarian oppression the world over.

Still, catch this rabbit while you can – who knows when it will next hop onto a stage near you.

White Rabbit Red Rabbit is at Soho Place to 9 November. Book White Rabbit Red Rabbit tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Nick Mohammed (Photo by David Vintiner)