Rich Kids: A history of shopping malls in Tehran (Electric Dreams Online Festival) Review

Overwhelmed by a myriad of images on our timelines constantly, photo sharing has become the norm in terms of how we communicate to others and curate our digital lives. Our accounts serving as digital legacies telling our story how we choose to, each image a gateway to a differing chapter. Delving into this phenomenon in their topical work Rich Kids: A history of shopping malls in Tehran, Javaad Alipoor and Kirsty Housely craft an early 21st century defining show tying together entitlement and technology to showcase the theatrical within our new normal.

For digital natives, Rich Kids:A history of shopping malls in Tehran taps into the fascination had with wealth and the elite, Instagram and YouTube the social media platforms of choice as we find ourselves going back and forth between the two – a mimicking of the behaviour we find ourselves displaying when catching up on the influencers of the moment. We’re reminded that this social media phenomena is just over 10 years old, and that although we are perhaps currently in arguably a transformative time post Covid-19, our world and how we know it always changes.

Interactivity plays a crucial role when accessing the show’s content,  Javaad Alipoor and Peyvand Sadeghian‘s narration guiding our steps and allowing for us to process the overriding narrative amidst an overload of information, again similar to the wealth of knowledge and content made available online. We’re reminded that shopping malls serve as a geological marker of our age, yet presently we witness a decline in high street commerce. Rich Kids ties global history to the present day, the concept of time explored and questioned throughout – in how we’re taught, we’re presented with time being linear, but is it?

A rich examination of a present world and its past, a present day ruled by an over processing of information. A piece of theatre that has challenged for me what theatre can be!

Review by Lucy Basaba.

Rich Kids: A history of shopping malls in Tehran is currently showing as part of this edition of the Electric Dreams Online Festival until Friday 14th August. To find out more about the production, visit here…