LONDON (FT) -- Generally, pre-show interviews take place in rehearsal rooms. But when I meet writer Atoosa Sepehr and dramatist Hannah Khalil, it’s in a kitchen. That’s because the kitchen is the rehearsal room for their new play, My English Persian Kitchen, during which the solo actress (Isabella Nefar) will cook a Persian dish. We’re about to give that recipe a trial run.
It’s also where this whole project started 17 years ago, when Sepehr, alone in London, and still reeling from fleeing a traumatic personal situation in Iran as a result of a disasterous marriage, began to crave home cooking.
“Everything I worked for I had to leave behind,” she recalls now. “I had to start all over again. I was 29. I missed my family. And that’s when I started to cook. It surprised me how much comfort it gave me.”
There was a problem, however — she had never learned to cook. Born in Iran and brought up by liberal parents, she studied computer science and worked in several highly demanding jobs, ending up running her own import and export company.
“I never wanted to be associated with the kitchen as the role of a woman,” she says. “I tried very hard to study, to work: to be equal to a man in society . . . So I couldn’t get [the recipes] right because I didn’t know what I was doing! I had to call my mum, my grandma, my aunts . . . ”
As Sepehr practised, her neighbours noticed the delicious aromas wafting out of her kitchen. So she started to share the food with them, expanding her repertoire and keeping notes, until she realised she had the makings of a recipe book. 
“Food in Iran is shared,” she explains. “Even on the street, if people are eating, they share it with you. So I used to text my neighbours: ‘I’ve cooked this, do you want me to bring some round?’
“I also wanted people to know more about the other side of Iran: the people; the sharing; the food. Because we hear a lot about Iran. Nobody talks about how warm and friendly people are . . . And the recipes were made with love. I spent hours to get them right, from generations and generations that have handed them down.”
That hospitality will extend to audiences from next week, as Khalil’s play, inspired both by Sepehr’s experience and by her beautifully illustrated cookbook, From a Persian Kitchen, premieres at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (followed by a run at London’s Soho Theatre). In it, an unnamed character, inspired by Sepehr, will tell her story of flight and restart while simultaneously making a meal.
For Khalil, the idea of cooking throughout the show was “a no-brainer”. “Food is at the heart of this story,” says the playwright, the daughter of a Palestinian father and an Irish mother. “And food knows no boundaries of language. It’s a lovely way to connect people.”
As the two women talk, they work, chopping parsley, dill, chives, spinach, mint, garlic and onions — ingredients for ash-e reshteh, the hearty aromatic Persian noodle and herb soup, which Nefar will cook during the show. On the work surface sits a glass of red golden liquid — saffron, a key ingredient. Sepehr and Khalil work easily and harmoniously together: this is a dish they have trialled often since having the idea. 
We talk about the significance of ash-e reshteh. It was the last meal Sepehr ate in Iran in advance of her frantic dash to the airport before her husband could stop her passport. So it has huge personal meaning. But it’s also a traditional meal eaten almost everywhere in Iran.
“Wherever you go people will have it on the street, at home, on occasions, for New Year,” says Sepehr. “It’s one of the symbolic dishes. It’s a homely, comforting dish.”
Incorporating herbs and spices as fellow performers brings challenges, however. With audiences in mind, the dish had to be nut-free and meat-free. Not all ingredients are easy to find in the UK, so a blend of feta cheese and sour cream is taking the role of kashk (a creamy, fermented sour yoghurt used as a garnish) — a move that feels pleasingly apt for a theatrical piece. 
Most importantly, all the slicing, boiling and frying has to work in harmony with the script, so that the most emotionally charged moments don’t get lost in a frenzy of chopping board action and, conversely, critical cooking points don’t suffer. “Too much chat and things start to burn,” says Khalil, wryly.
Composing the script was also a precarious balancing act, says Khalil: “I’m trying to honour Atoosa’s story, but it’s not Atoosa, it’s a fictional character based on her . . . [in the play] she could have come from pretty much anywhere.”
(Continued on Page 7)