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written & directed by Maryam Khalili

Unread Archives, SummerWorks Performance Festival, The Theatre Centre, Franco Boni Theatre, 1115 Queen St. W., Toronto

August 16, 2026

It gives me no pleasure to report that, by the end of Date of Performance, I felt relieved. For much of its 80 minutes, I had to fight my body’s impulse to step out of the theatre. Around me, spectators kept leaving before the performance was over, each exit sending an abrupt cone of light into the galling darkness.

That frustration feels unfortunate because Maryam Khalili’s lecture-performance grows out of a compelling proposition. Drawing on interviews, prison letters, archival material, and post-release writings, the show documents theatre practices created inside Iranian prisons between 1954 and 2024 — performances conceived by political detainees under censorship and isolation. Hovering over the project is a potent question: Can there be a performance without a performer?

At the SummerWorks Festival, that absence felt claustrophobic. For the entirety of the show, we hear personal accounts through recorded Farsi voices while English translations appear on a screen. Bodies have been reduced to voices, their presence and accounts travelling through technology. There is a logic to that choice. Yet, the total refusal of theatricality ultimately feels disengaging, almost a breach of the pact with the audience.

Date of Performance is an overly long piece of reportage, transmitting interview after interview with people we barely come to know. The testimonies are often diffuse, with little shaping or contextualization, while nothing else happens onstage. Rather than producing a dramaturgy of absence, the recordings accumulate like largely unedited archival material. After listening to more than 20 voices, I was left with the dispiriting sensation that I had learned very little.

Even the projected text, which might function like a contemporary Brechtian placard – its textualization of the scene intended to activate critical thought – remains largely functional rather than revelatory. Why, then, should I sit in a theatre to read the text when I could do so from the comfort of my couch? What is the theatrical event adding to the experience? Worse, even if this material were a book, its argument would still feel too shallow though the production struggles to build one. Its archival fragments repeatedly point towards resistance, but never sufficiently shape those ideas into an argument.

I do not doubt that making theatre in prison carried profound meaning for the people whose voices we hear. Indeed, that conviction may be the most moving thing Date of Performance tries to leave behind. The tragedy is that the production never finds a theatrical form capable of making us feel it.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photo: Scene from Date of Production. © 2026 Maryam Khalili.

For tickets visit summerworks.ca.