The sensation of racing a high-performance car along a swanky boulevard in Tehran is surely akin to watching this high-tech, high-octane production by Javaad Alipoor and Kirsty Housley. With our phones open on Instagram as well as seeing images projected on stage, we’re subjected to a fact-laden, multimedia collage – all hashtags, live feeds and rapid scrolling – almost overwhelming in its detail.
The form suggests the sensory overload of a young and wealthy elite, the kind who, like Chatunga Mugabe, son of Robert, might find it entertaining to pour champagne over a priceless watch simply because they can.
Engagingly played by Alipoor and Peyvand Sadeghian, Rich Kids is about more than the excessive consumption of the rich offspring of Iran’s revolutionary elite, however. Their behaviour is compellingly shocking, not least given the principles of their parents and the standards of a country where alcohol, let alone cocaine, is outlawed for Muslim citizens. But in his kaleidoscopic script, Alipoor delves below the horrifying Made in Chelsea-style glamour to create an epoch-spanning vision of human waste.
Using Instagram as an analogy for archaeology, each picture taking us a step further into the past, he whisks us back to the age of portrait painting, in which the rich made Insta-like memorials to their own wealth, and then further into geological time. The story of two young rich people in a fatal Porsche crash in Tehran is told backwards – like scrolling through an Instagram feed. But the script also looks forwards to the legacy our generation will bequeath to the future. The components of the phones we have in our hands, they point out, will last for an inconceivable amount of time after we are gone.
Like a companion piece to Sea Sick, a marine-themed eco-warning at CanadaHub, the show makes us complicit in the unrestrained consumerism devastating the planet. It’s dazzling, discombobulating and alarming.
At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 25 August
