While Sohrab Haghverdi seems determined to be remembered as the man who drank his own urine at the Fringe, the subtext of this solo performance is even more challenging. With video guest appearances from the creative director of the venue, a cough-fit that tests the patience and too much information about Hagverdi’s genital irregularities, FORIEGNER (sic) takes the audience’s need to laugh and show their approval of the performer and filters it through a blender of live art chaos, complicated politics and the performativity of autobiographical identity that parodies the enthusiasm for both inclusion and exclusion.
For a conventional theatrical performance, FORIEGNER takes risks: an uneven structure, aggressive audience and sexualised engagement, self-consciously dumb humour and grotesque descriptions of medical procedure. There are amusing anecdotes about his family, his visa requirements and plenty of foolish physical comedy before, abruptly, Hagverdi launches into an attack on the notions of diversity and inclusivity that seek to belittle his creativity and compel him to fit into a white stereotypes of ‘the foreigner’. He argues that he is exoticised and that the political situation in his homeland is more obscure that liberalism can recognise.
And he proves the point: he takes on a caricature of the Persian mystic, using Rumi to justify insulting the audience and making comments about women’s breasts. The more he assaults the audience’s sensibilities, the more they laugh. Like a bouffon, he finds the clown in the spectator and exploits it.
And then he drinks his own urine.
FORIEGNER, Summerhall, until 30 Aug (not 25), 9pm