If you worked in English theatre over the last fifteen years or so you will have noticed an economic and social imperative toward subjective and critical modesty in the spaces of r&d. Here is an experiential generalisation: in the early 21st century, any one (white middle class) dramaturg could seemingly develop any play (I quote many ((white, middle class)) dramaturgs saying so, for example, in my book).
This turning-of-hands to all new works was both a sign of the times and the good people of theatre just doing their job. With the plethora of more diverse projects in terms of form, content, identity, projected audience etc. in the early 21st century, the newish literary and dramaturgical workforce applied their wage labour to supporting artists on a not so dazzling post-fordist array of diverse projects for less diverse audiences. It kind of didn’t matter what came in if you could hazard a way to help – not least because helping feels right on to the leftwing, no?
In retrospect, this dynamism in English dramaturgy might make a younger, entry point workforce cringe – to say the least. Culturally and socially (that is to say through funded intervention), we now do something opposite. There is a disinclination to facilitate everything – even if, somewhat ironically, a proximal relationship to a majority white audience is anticipated. The choice on what to dramaturg is sometimes self-selecting and sometimes barred. What to dramaturg is now not simply a matter of workplace responsibility, but clearly an ethical way of being that determines who should be in the relational space of discovery in the room. Personally, the result is: where once I might have spoken, I am now silent. Where once I might have been present, I am now absent. Where once I might have researched, I accept standpoint limitations. Where once I might have dramaturged what my AD told me to, I sometimes don’t. Where once I stood in, I now apply for funding for additional creative support etc.
And so, what is it – in Reading, UK, at the University of Reading – for me to facilitate an r&d on a new play about 1978 Iran in January 2026? It is to know that because I applied for ACE seed-funding for a project, because I helped facilitate the early development of the project, prior to the entry of other – more appropriate creative support – this does not make me necessarily in any way a good person in the room. Within the context of the Work in Progress project, there are other considerations though. Since the funding is achieved on a somewhat geographical basis, demographic is important, but a blanket access for young people into r&d is more broadly determining.
What is it to organise a staged reading in a University black box theatre, with a group of students, to support the playwright Rosanna Jahangard – an established Reading-based theatre-maker and playwright of Iranian-Irish heritage of national acclaim? It is Jahangard who is working on a new play set in 1978, Iran. To organise a staged reading of Jahangard’s emerging play, Royal Road, at this time, then, is to offer a tentative support-in-kind to Jahangard, in the context of the above on dramaturgy, on a day when, simultaneously, an institutional email is sent to all Iranian students.
On the 14th January 2026, the day of Jahangard’s staged reading on campus, we work together with six students to read, discuss, and then scratch the play.
On this day, the University also sends an email offering support at a time of political (and perhaps personal) crisis: following days of widespread anti-government protests, deaths, government sanctioned internet cut-offs, and those enacting forms of symbolic and direct action dismissed as vandals – in Iran (BBC, January 8 2026). To hold space for a unit of Jahangard’s r&d on Royal Road is to hold space for the past to collide with the present (in a theatre), at a time of heightened international security alerts. It is to undertake a first-draft read-through (in a theatre) against a backdrop of diasporic anxiety, or contextualised by recent events that, as the University of Reading put it, for Iranians, are ‘difficult to process […], where minds can race with difficult thoughts for the future’. And, yet, in the theatre – on this day – we turn, at this time, to the past within the present: to 1978 in 2026.
I cannot offer an overview of Royal Road here other than to confirm its wonderful examination of (some) events in Iran in 1978 through the lens of the domestic and family. This is because the project is Jahangard’s to describe and quantify. It is also because, whilst supporting a move towards her second draft, my knowledge on Iran remains a void. Or, in the words of Javaad Alipoor ‘[t]o non-Iranians, that void is contained within a bigger void. There are more things you need to know’ (2023 [my emphasis]).
Alipoor was referring here to the void of knowledge – specifically around the story of Feredoun Farrokhzad, a story contained within the wider void of knowledge around Iran’s political and social contemporary histories. This void of Iran exists everywhere beyond Iran. Farrokhzad, the subject of Alipoor’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, was an Iranian pop star who, after the revolution in ‘79, when the Khomeini ousted the Shah, […] went into exile […], then found mysteriously and brutally killed’ (ibid). Alipoor notes that, in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, ‘the story of his murder is the void’ (ibid). Of things hidden in voids.
What do we know of voids? Voids can contain individual narratives, personal histories, political histories, national histories. Voids can encompass whole theocratic regimes, in power since 1979; they can swallow histories of regime responses of a roughly 90 million population. They can imbibe long view economic analyses. They refute historical materialist readings of the past and its relationship to the present, the present’s relationship with itself and, as the University of Reading notes, compromise any reasonable conjecture of ‘the future’.
To be held in an r&d – by contrast – might be akin to working towards filling a void (fleshing out an idea etc.). In the parts of Jahangard’s r&d that I’ve encountered as a not-dramaturg, I am reminded that to fill voids in plays via r&ds is also to necessarily acknowledge the co-presence of voids and voids beyond voids. To care for an r&d must also necessarily be a research and development of what is hidden. Or, R&D means a Really Deep feeling that there are more things you need to know.
lucy tyler 