Haghverdi's 'Foriegner' at EdFringe: urine, rants, Rumi
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- Sohrab Haghverdi performs his 'anti-comedy clown show' 'Foriegner' at Summerhall, Edinburgh, with the title's misspelling deliberate
- Haghverdi claims drinking his own urine could help him secure an O-1B US visa for 'virtuoso artistic talent,' using sperm and urine as recurring symbols throughout the piece
- Haghverdi launches into a 'splenetic rant' in favour of Trump's bombing of Iran, which the reviewer labels 'punk theatre: irritating and brash'
- Directors Benjamin and Mason Rosenthal co-direct the show, but Haghverdi 'resists being boxed in' by them and rejects being labelled as Iranian or a minority
- The show's connecting thread draws on the philosophy of Rumi, the 13th-century mystic who urged people to kill their false self in order to live truly
- 'Foriegner' runs at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August, and the reviewer calls it 'equal parts perplexing and delightful'
Why it matters: Haghverdi uses bodily-fluid stunts and political provocations to refuse categorization as Iranian, minority, or linear storyteller, and the O-1B-visa conceit turns a real US immigration category for 'virtuoso' talent into the show's satirical engine. For Edinburgh Fringe audiences, the result is a Marmite-style provocation that resists conventional theatrical packaging.
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