(Fore)named is a story about disintegration. It starts with a journey that the Iranian director Ali Asghar Dashti took a few years ago to St Petersburg where he had been invited by a festival to present a travelling project based on White Nights by Dostoyevsky and One Thousand and One Nights. However, due to financial difficulties, rather mysteriously, the piece was cut back little by little until it disappeared altogether. Fore(named) retraces this story with an incredible mise en abyme combining writing that blends the explicit and the tacit, with masterly recitation. On stage, the regular and precise conversations between Ali Asghar Dashti, the festival director and the Russian-Farsi interpreter are interwoven with a series of imaginary conversations that Ali Asghar, in Russia at the time, dreams of having with Mikhail Gorbachev. Both men are facing collapse and disintegration: one of his project, the other of the Soviet Union and his illusions. A disintegration that echoes the company’s situation once the show is cancelled since we don’t know whether the actors are going back to Iran or instead make the most of the situation and leave their country behind. A show devised like powerful clockwork, capable of stirring up subtle criticism of the relationship between art and power.

Confronted with the SARS-CoV-2 crisis, we had to cancel this project