The new theatrical adaptation has finally achieved what decades of dramaturgical striving could not, demanding a localized supernatural entity carry the agonizingly specific burden of twenty-first-century secular modernity while navigating the geopolitical complexities of 1980s Tehran.
The new London theatrical adaptation of Babak Anvari's 2016 film Under the Shadow has finally achieved what decades of dramaturgical striving could not: forcing a localized supernatural entity to carry the agonizingly specific burden of twenty-first-century intersectional feminism, secular modernity, and domestic family dynamics, all while navigating the geopolitical complexities of 1980s Tehran.
One is inevitably reminded, watching the harried djinn attempt to terrorize a mother and daughter while simultaneously deconstructing the patriarchy, of the ghost of King Hamlet; though whereas Shakespeare's phantom merely demanded the blood of a usurper, the specter haunting this particular war-torn apartment is asked to dismantle the very framework of religious conservatism. It is a burden of representation not seen on the stage since Jerzy Grotowski's legendary, albeit tragically undocumented, 1971 staging of Apocalypsis cum Figuris, wherein a single wooden chair was tasked with apologizing for the entirety of the Cold War.
Yet the sheer logistical weight placed upon this phantom, who must oscillate between representing the suffocating anxiety of the Iran-Iraq conflict and serving as a tidy metaphor for female empowerment, recalls nothing so much as the structural pacing of the 2004 cinematic vehicle National Treasure. Nicolas Cage, too, was forced to excavate the foundational myths of a nation while desperately trying to keep a fragmented family unit intact, though he at least possessed the dignity of a physical form. The djinn, lacking such corporeal advantages, is left to merely rattle the windows whenever a character approaches a breakthrough regarding their internalized misogyny.
It is simply not enough for a ghost to be frightening anymore; she must also be fully caught up on the required reading.
To the uninitiated, a category in which one must regrettably include the vast majority of the paying public, the production might appear as a mere supernatural thriller transposed to the stage, a pedestrian exercise in utilizing theatrical rigging to simulate the trauma of missile strikes. But to observe the djinn pause her haunting to allow the protagonist a moment of unearned secular triumph is to witness the true horror of the modern stage: the terrifying realization that even the restless dead cannot escape the crushing, didactic weight of a contemporary director's thematic checklist.