Theatre director Ramin Gray explains the inspiration behind his production of Blind Hamlet which is on at The North Wall

A few years ago in Edinburgh I came across Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s beguiling play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. Essentially a cunning message in a bottle from a young Iranian male unable to leave his country before completing military service, it spins an elegantly surreal tale around this crux. At every showing, like in 1001 Nights, a new actor reads the play then, instead of being beheaded, is replaced at the next performance.

Three things struck me about Soleimanpour’s play: an appealingly heightened self-awareness often found in contemporary Iranian cinema; a witty sense of the power of writing itself; and, at last, someone making formally challenging theatre. Half-Iranian myself, I responded and set about contacting him. He talked about Duchamp, about Tim Crouch and Mafia. This last was a secret passion of mine, a game created in 1986 in the Maths Department of Moscow University by Dmitry Davidoff, an important stage in the evolution of game theory. A highly sophisticated version of Wink Murder, I’ve often used it in writing workshops as it contains all the necessary elements of playmaking, even dramatic irony.

Nassim’s idea was to find a way to squeeze Hamlet through the Mafia structure to create an event similar to one of Duchamp’s Readymades: easily reproducible, dependent on audience engagement and which would challenge the structure of theatre itself.

Grand ambitions. But I noticed Rabbit had eliminated the role of the director, of rehearsal even: my whole career was under threat. And if Nassim reinvented what is thought to have been common practice in the Elizabethan era, the cue script where actors discover the play in performance, it also generated a simple freshness, a palpable liveness. What if, Nassim conjectured, it would be possible to go one further than Rabbit and replace the actor with… the audience? One of the many performers to have gone through Rabbit was playwright David Greig. I had commissioned him to write The Events, a play for Actors Touring Company drawn out of the Anders Breivik Norway killings affair, and we decided to incorporate a choir. I’m sure David’s experience of being in Nassim’s play helped create the participatory role of the new community choir. One of the most touching things about The Events is watching ‘real’ people taking part in something they don’t know. And being aware that whatever real people do on stage is right.

So we set about getting Nassim to London to start work. We first met on neutral ground in Istanbul because it’s fiendishly hard to get Iranians into the UK but Ania Obolewicz, ATC’s intrepid assistant producer, battled the UK Border Agency. And in May we began work.

Hamlet quivers with doubt from the Ghost’s authenticity to the question of existence and Mafia with its poisonous atmosphere of doubt seemed a brilliant fit. How to marry the two? We tried many algorithmic structures, worked with a brilliant improviser Sean McCann who guided test audiences through our Elsinores. We arrived at an intriguing hybrid, which annexes Samuel Beckett and Shakespeare while managing to be Iranian and true to itself: Blind Hamlet.

Hamlet opens with this question: Who’s there? It’s a profound enquiry into the nature of identity and the role of action. Nassim’s play puts those questions to the audience. Given our experience on The Events, I was curious to extend this enquiry with Actors Touring Company. The fact we’re now touring a show with no actors to interrogate that role: Is it sufficient to activate the spectator to become the actor? With audiences hungry for engagement, it’s interesting to look at that desire, not dress it up as an experiential theme park. What is it to act? What is it to be? And how really do we see those things?