When Atoosa Sepehr fled Iran overnight for a new life in London, family recipes helped her stave off homesickness. Now her story has been turned into a drama – with mouthwatering onstage cooking
When the Iran-born cookery book author Atoosa Sepehr first met Hannah Khalil, the playwright tasked with bringing her life to the London stage, the women found plenty of common ground. But there was one thing, above all, that bonded the two: “We spent most of the time talking about food,” says Khalil. The pair are joining me on a video call as their play My English Persian Kitchen – inspired by Sepehr’s journey from Iran to Britain and the cooking from home that helped her plant new roots – enters its first week of rehearsals.
In fact, it was over a Zoom call in 2021 that they had that first meeting. Soho theatre’s David Luff had read Sepehr’s story, of fleeing overseas in 2007 to escape her bad marriage, in the Guardian. With a husband unprepared to grant her a divorce, and without the power to obtain one herself, she left almost overnight, with just an hour’s window before he would block the documents that would allow her to leave the country.
