English review – this Pulitzer-winning play is smart, subtle and deceptively feelgood

Late into Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize-winning debut play English, a character professes an actual hatred of the English language. Given she’s been furiously studying it for years, with considerable grit and defiance, her animosity towards it seems almost perverse. But this profound ambivalence around the learning of language, particularly the learning of English, is fundamental to Toossi’s play; it deepens and problematises what is essentially a humanist comedy of manners.

Columbian writer and translator Ingrid Rojas Contreras said that “when you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss”. Toossi understands and articulates this loss with great sensitivity and insight, as her five characters grapple with the liminality of the bilingual self, straddled between oppositional worldviews. English avoids the geopolitical to its detriment, but it interrogates its central themes with energy and rigour.

Marjan (Salme Geransar) teaches English in Iran. She’s lived a number of years abroad, but she’s returned to her country of origin under circumstances she’s unwilling to share with her students, who have varying degrees of proficiency and contrasting reasons for being there. Roya (Marjan Mesbahi) wants to learn English so she can talk with her Canadian-born granddaughter; Elham (Maia Abbas) wants to study anatomy at RMIT in Melbourne; Goli (Delaram Ahmadi) isn’t sure why she’s there, other than a vague desire to expand her horizons; and Omid (Osamah Sami), whose English is suspiciously good, seems to be there for the sheer joy of communication.

Toossi employs a dramatic device that initially feels merely pragmatic, but resonates in increasingly intriguing ways. When the characters are speaking English, they adopt thick, stilted Farsi accents, but when they speak in their “native tongue”, the actors simply drop the inflection and use their own Australian accents. It means there is no Farsi actually spoken on stage; the audience substitutes Australian English for Farsi in the theatrical equivalent of live dubbing. The effect is quietly uncanny, as if the English language is intimidating the Persian language right off the stage. As a metaphor for cultural imperialism, it’s ingenious and disturbing.

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Director Tasnim Hossain conducts the play’s moods with control and suppleness, bringing shape and metre to scenes that could easily become choppy or fragmentary. There is a brightness to the cast’s physicality, a sense of ease and confidence, but Hossain also knows when to engage stillness and interiority. She’s able to establish tone and then subtly shift or alter it, to suggest what the playwright has left off the page.

The actors are uniformly excellent. Marjan is the play’s key character and Geransar brings a real sense of gravitas and wearied dignity to her. She bristles and frets, but she is also capable of magnanimity and warmth. Abbas is formidable – and frequently hilarious – as the play’s main antagonist, baiting her classmates, challenging her teacher, constantly massaging her grievance but growing stronger under every perceived slight. Mesbahi expertly underplays her heartbreak, which makes her all the more heartbreaking. Ahmadi is delightful, charming and funny, and Sami is solid and winning as the man with the secrets. Individually, they all shine; as an ensemble, they’re triumphant.

The set and costumes (Kat Chan) are effortlessly evocative of the quotidian spaces of learning familiar to students the world over – the unforgiving fluorescent lights, the insistent clock, the washed out colours. Paul Lim’s excellent lighting is responsive and moody, and Hamed Sadeghi’s composition is well judged. The production is chock full of debut creatives at MTC, and it’s a joy to behold them navigate this tricky play with such conviction.

English feels a little like a Trojan horse, smuggling some very smart and provocative ideas into a deceptively feelgood comedy. But in one respect, it’s underdone. Iran has moved from a modern, pluralist democracy into a theocratic dictatorship, a place where women’s rights continue to be whittled away and where hard-line religious dogma is inflicted on its people. English never directly mentions religion and its depiction of gender relations is fancifully sunny. In a play that otherwise aims for realism, this feels slightly dishonest. Perhaps it’s just expedient.

Where the play excels is in its thoughtful and poignant exploration of language and identity, the ways in which cultural markers are shed and adopted when we cross and recross national thresholds. Toossi teases out some brilliant deliberations on accents, their ability to bestow or strip individuals of power and status. And she brings to shimmering life the awful disconnect inherent to diasporas, the terrible sacrifice people are forced to make when they leave their homes, their people and especially their language. English isn’t just a hard language to learn, it’s sometimes devastating. You can hate it and have to learn it anyway.

• English runs at MTC’s The Sumner until 24 August