Iranian work Blind Runner is defiant artmaking across borders
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Iranian theatremaker Amir Reza Koohestani's Mehr Theatre Group is presenting Blind Runner at Esplanade's The Studios 2026 season.
PHOTO: BENJAMIN KRIEG
- Blind Runner, by Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani, explores themes of political oppression and separation through a minimalist play about a blind marathoner and her guide fleeing danger.
- The play is created across borders with actors in exile and in Tehran.
- Blind Runner has received international acclaim and tours globally, with plans for future performances in California.
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SINGAPORE – The United States’ ongoing “unjust war” on Iran looms dreadfully over Iranian director and playwright Amir Reza Koohestani’s Blind Runner, which plays in Singapore from July 31 to Aug 2. But he cautions the play does not need the noise of war to stay relevant: “In fact, war can obscure its clarity.”
The show has roots in the aftermath of the crackdown on Iran’s Green Movement in 2009, when Koohestani started running to escape the memories of tear gas. That small freedom was soon aborted when an orthopaedist ordered him to stop running indefinitely after a bad cramp. Running is fraught with political implications in Blind Runner, which sees a political prisoner’s husband guide a blind marathoner in a perilous dash across the Channel Tunnel to avoid being hit by a train.
“Seventeen years later, I still can’t run and I don’t. I didn’t make a piece about a man who runs – I made one about what running means when you no longer can,” the 48-year-old tells The Straits Times in an e-mail interview. The Persian-language show plays at the Esplanade Theatre Studio as part of the Esplanade’s Studios season.
Premiered in 2023, Blind Runner received a special citation from the judges of the 2025 Obie Awards, who called it “a revolutionary piece in a time of revolutionary needs”, and was presented at the 2024 Venice International Theatre Festival. On the international touring circuit, critics have lavished praise on the minimalist two-hander’s visual poetry and Koohestani has been acknowledged for his innovative use of live cinema using pan-tilt-zoom surveillance cameras.
With part of Mehr Theatre Group operating out of Tehran and the rest in exile across Europe, the show is also a defiant feat of artmaking across borders, shaped by the inevitable reality that scenes can be assembled and rehearsed only virtually, with lost weeks of rehearsal time due to spotty internet connection.
Koohestani is based in Berlin, although he wryly suggests that “based” is a “generous word for a life lived between a dozen stations and airports”. On the trying conditions of making theatre, he says: “I’ve stopped treating that as a problem to solve. The separation is now inside the plays: people who are close and still cannot reach each other. Blind Runner is two bodies tied together and apart at once – that isn’t a metaphor I invented, it’s how we make the work.”
The separation has only worsened after US President Donald Trump ordered the attack on Iran in February, making it even more difficult for Koohestani to move in and out of Tehran: “The border decides more than I do. I try not to make that the subject of every conversation, but it is the weather I work in.”
The play was inspired by the imprisoned Iranian journalist Niloofar Hamedi, who ran in her slippers in the prison yard as a form of protest while her husband, a marathon runner, ran outside in solidarity. While spectacles often capture the public’s imagination, Koohestani wants to turn the focus on the everyday: “I didn’t want their quieter pain to be lost amidst more dramatic stories. The image of two runners tied together, with one leading the other, became a powerful way to portray both concepts simultaneously.”
When in Singapore, Koohestani will run a masterclass titled Daily Life As Performance on Aug 3, inspired by a workshop he did at the prestigious itinerant masterclass Ecole des Maitres in 2025. The workshop is rooted in the belief that theatre consists mainly of unnoticed actions – cooking, travelling or gathering, for example: “Like running, waiting has become an especially meaningful act for me – whether waiting for a message, at a checkpoint, or for a verdict that determines your allowed place to live.”
Iranian director and playwright Amir Reza Koohestani.
PHOTO: BEA BORGERS
He was last in Singapore for the 2014 Singapore International Festival of Arts to stage Amid The Clouds, which traces the journey of two asylum seekers as they travel from the Balkans to England. He says of the Republic: “What stays with me is the warm welcome, the street food and how long the light lingered.”
After Singapore, Blind Runner is slated to run in California as part of South Coast Repertory’s season in October. Says Koohestani: “After that, I really look forward to its performances in Tehran. I am very optimistic that it will happen soon.”
Book It/Blind Runner
Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio
When: July 31 and August 1, 8pm; August 2, 3pm
Admission: $42 and $34 (concession)
Info: str.sg/japw
