Review Roundup: WISH YOU WERE HERE at the Gate Theatre

The Gate Theatre is presenting the UK premiere of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here, a funny and astute drama, vividly exploring female friendships and how life can impact them against a backdrop of marriages and revolution. Directed by Sepy Baghaei, Wish You Were Here will run at Theatro Technis @ 26 Crowndale to Saturday 23 November.

Five friends, three weddings and unabashed humour.  Amongst conversations on unibrows, depilation, forbidden music and shared wax strips, five Iranian women exchange dreams whilst planning their future lives.  Playful, intimate and surprisingly naughty, these girlfriends are completely unfiltered behind closed doors. 

Set against simmering political tensions of Iran over 14 years, Sanaz Toossi’s dazzling play piquantly evokes a living room alive with humour, sexual precocity, and real female friendship as it charts a decade of sisterhood and platonic love with raw honesty and outrageous humour. See what the critics are saying...

Cindy Marcolina, BroadwayWorld: While this isn’t the easiest watch on a dreary autumn evening, it’s a triumphant mosaic of affection, solidarity, and loss framed by the heart-wrenching effects of upheaval. It side-steps nostalgia entirely and opts for open-hearted ingenuity instead.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: Some of the actors’ speech seems halting, straining for silences that are over-egged and empty. But the performances warm up and all the while this play is building its subtle, often unspoken, emotional architecture. Played straight through and frustratingly slow at times, there is a great surging power to its end, with a big emotional payoff that is well worth the wait. These people are each other’s homes, and it is through them that they find belonging.