Rich Kids Live Stream for Trav

Oct 29 2020 | By Thom Dibdin More

Javaad Alipoor to stream hit shows at Traverse 3

Manchester-based Javaad Alipoor Company is to give two online adaptations of EdFringe hits their Scottish premieres with live streams on the Traverse’s year-round festival website: Traverse 3.

The adaptation of 2019 hit Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran will get two streamings on Thurs 29 and Fri 30 October, with 2017’s The Believers Are But Brothers being streamed for one performance only on Friday 6 November 2020.

JavaadAlipoor and Payvand Sadeghian in Rich Kids. Pic: Screengrab

Writer and director Javaad Alipoor said: “In this online version of Rich Kids we want to find a way to bring a genuine interaction between the digital and the theatrical, to bring out the pervasiveness of the original work, and really explore those parts of the show that speak to the feeling that our world is falling apart.”

Watching a preview performance of the new online version of the show last week, it felt as is Alipoor has achieved his aim, at least in terms of creating a discombobulating and credible version of this play about privilege, rich elites and the fragmentation of reality in a technological mirror.

Starting from the deaths in April 2015 in a car crash on Shirati Boulevard in Tehran of Parivash Akbarzadeh and her lover Hossein Rabbani-Shirazi – the grandson of a famous revolutionary Ayatollah – the play spins through time and instagram accounts to explore the realm of super rich play-children and the nature of capitalism.

immediacy

It’s a fascinating piece of theatre, given an authentic live feel to it by Alipoor and co-performer Peyvand Sadeghian. There’s an immediacy and feeling of being in the room as the live-stream goes onto Instagram and you can see you fellow audience members join up.

The Instagram link is key, as it is through Shirati’s Insta account and the hashtag #richkidsoftehran that Alipoor and Sadeghian explore what happens to the youth of a revolution who have more wealth than they can control. Even in the midst of US sanctions and general poverty.

Javaad Alipoor and Peyvand Sadeghian in Rich Kids. Pic: Screengrab

The links are there to be drawn with the rich kids of the UK, whose games with their inherited wealth and lack of social responsibility are several levels ahead of the kids of Tehran. The UK’s irresponsible rich kids have come to replace their parents as leaders of the country, after all.

More intriguingly, Instagram provides a different perspective of time, as Alipoor and Sadeghian go back through Instagram accounts, watching time fall away. They drop into shopping malls across the world for some seriously kitsch pre-Insta memories and drift even further back to events known only through archeological excavations.

old orders are collapsing

The second production, The Believers Are But Brothers, also reflects that we live in a time where old orders are collapsing – from the post-colonial nation states of the Middle East, to the EU and the American election. Through it all, tech savvy and bloodthirsty groups like ISIS run through European drawn border lines.

Amidst this, there is a generation of young men who find themselves burning with resentment; without the money, power and sex they think they deserve. This crisis of masculinity leads them on a journey into an online world of fantasy, violence and reality.

Alipoor spent time exploring how ISIS and the alt-right radicalise online and tells the story through documentary, interactivity and fiction in a production which has toured the world and been adapted for TV on the BBC