In 1992, Iranian pop star and refugee Fereydoun Farrokhzad was found brutally murdered.
The case was never solved, but now forms the basis of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a collaboration between the Manchester-based Javaad Alipoor Company, HOME Manchester and Sydney’s National Theatre of Parramatta. The show is the latest addition (October 22-November 5) to HOME's autumn season.
Written, directed and performed by Javaad Alipoor, the company explores the story in a multimedia staging.
Farrokhzad was the Middle East’s biggest pop star of the 1970s, but by 1981 he was a refugee working in a German grocery shop. Six months before being found brutally murdered, he performed to sold-out audiences over two nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
British-Iranian, Manchester-based, Bradford artist and writer Javaad Alipoor began a trilogy of plays about how technology, resentment and fracturing identities are changing the world. The first part – The Believers Are But Brothers (2017) – opened in Edinburgh and won a Fringe First award before its London transfer (a revival was also seen at HOME in late 2020). That show was commissioned for TV by the BBC and The Space and adapted and produced by the Company.
The sequel – Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2019) – premiered at the Traverse Theatre, where it also won a Fringe First (actually shown first at HOME, in late 2019). The play’s London transfer and national tour were postponed by Covid-19 inspiring the creation of a digital version that premiered with Battersea Arts Centre in summer 2020 and went on to be presented across the US and Australia.
Things Hidden…. (2022) is the final part of the trilogy.