Theatre of war: making an Edinburgh Fringe show about Iran while your country is being bombed

As Israel bombed Iran in June, Sara Amini was preparing to bring a play about her childhood in Tehran to the Edinburgh Fringe. Here the writer and performer explores the impact of war - then and now - on her creative work.

Saria Callas artwork. Photo by Harry Elletson. Edited by Hamid Beiki.

Tehran, 8 March, 1988. A little boy builds a tent for himself using a few pieces of cloth and pillows, pretending it’s a home of his own. As he places the final piece, a deafening sound throws him to the ground. Not only is his little home destroyed, but the windows of his actual house – the safest place in the world to him – shatter.

The little girl, in those days, was running through wheat fields in her floral dress, far from the capital, competing with friends over who had seen the most lizards. Every day at school, they made them stand in line and pray for the soldiers. She watches soldiers leaving for the war on television, knowing many may never return.

The rest of the little girl’s story is told in Saria Callas, although her story is just a launching pad for stories of others. She is their storyteller, even as she becomes a mother herself, parenting a gender-questioning child in the UK and reflecting on what it means to raise a child in freedom, and how fragile that freedom feels.

But in Saria Callas, I do not mention that years later, the little girl meets the little boy. In pursuit of freedom, they leave behind their loved ones and friends in their homeland. Of course, many details have also been left out of this short article – details far more important than general statements about freedom leading nowhere. Of the daily struggles of that little girl and boy, of millions like them who, over 46 years, have watched their hair turn white under suppression and tyranny.

Freedom is everything I wanted to talk about in Saria Callas. Freedom without “ifs” and “buts”, without preferring one person’s liberty over another’s, and a deep understanding of bodily autonomy and the right to one’s voice. Something that seems obvious has become increasingly out of reach, even in countries that call themselves defenders of liberty, perhaps because we speak in vague generalities, ignoring the details.

Details like homes collapsing on children. The daily battles of millions of people with nothing but empty hands. The heartbreak of a lonely migrant thousands of kilometres away, as their loved ones are bombed by foreign forces that claim, absurdly, to be bringing freedom, while burying people beneath the rubble of their homes. When the beautiful, liberating word “freedom” stands next to the ugliest word in the world: war.

On the cursed day of 13 June, 2025, the little girl – now grown up, with only the bitter laughter of those days remaining – wakes up in London. The little boy, now with a white beard who for 16 years has been unable to return to his country – simply because he is a journalist – says to her: Last night, Israel attacked Iran.

They were thousands of kilometres away, yet it felt like the house collapsed on them. Must children once again grow up in the shadow of war, denied their childhoods?

In that moment, my mind went through countless questions: Is this the beginning of the end for my country, Iran? This is the same terrifying instability that the “West” brought to the Middle East when it attacked Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Have all the civil struggles of the brave women and men of my country now come to nothing?

And then the painful details. Has my favourite café been destroyed? Is the street I return to every time I close my eyes now rubble? Has the City Theatre been damaged? Are my sister, brother, my mother, my father still alive?

And the question that maybe mattered least in that moment, but echoing louder and louder. What should I do with Saria Callas? I’m supposed to perform it at the Edinburgh Fringe. What if the audience thinks my anti-oppression stance means I support war, violence, and the attack on my country?

Maybe I shouldn’t perform Saria Callas. For days, amid the constant turmoil of attack, I wondered what to do. I spoke with my terrified, exhausted friends in Tehran. Friends who had shifted their hopes from a better life for themselves to a better life for their children, and now spend all night awake beside them, praying the roof won’t collapse on them. I worried that even for a moment, my performance might give someone the impression that Western military intervention is what we seek in our struggle for freedom.

I spoke with my closest friend, whose daughter is the same age as mine. During the war she let her daughter watch cartoons for hours so she didn’t hear the sirens, the missiles, the anti-aircraft fire. This from a mother who used to allow 45 minutes of screen time a day. But war changes everything.

So now what is my priority? To speak of freedom? Or to cry out against war? Are these two things even in conflict How can I be vocally anti-oppression without being mistaken for supporting war or state collapse? In Saria, I speak of the essence of freedom. And how naive we are to believe freedom can be born from bloodstained hands.

So, as always, I should trust my audience. Because that fear, as much as the hope, is part of what I bring to the stage. I should stand bare before them and ask: what is the meaning of freedom? And I should trust that the people who come to the Edinburgh Fringe come with their hearts and minds open and willing to understand the nuances of the myriad message that can be built into 60 minutes of a theatre performance.

Written by Sara Amini. Originally published 18th Aug 2025, 22:50 BST in The Scotsman