Australia didn’t want actresses like her. But then things changed

Actor Salme Geransar thought she and her family were the only Iranians in Australia when she moved here from Tehran at the age of four. Her new home on NSW’s Central Coast was a world away from the one she’d left. “I felt a lot of shame for being different and tried to hide any aspect of my Iranian-ness to fit in,” she recalls. “We didn’t celebrate any Persian culture, like Persian New Year, or listen to Persian music.”

Her experience will be familiar to many young migrants: “I grew up feeling like I didn’t belong in either culture. I wasn’t Iranian and I wasn’t Australian.”

Geransar is about to star in Melbourne Theatre Company’s English, the local premiere of the Pulitzer-winning play by US playwright Sanaz Toossi, whose mother fled Iran following the 1979 revolution. It’s a laugh-out-loud script, and many US productions have been met with rave reviews. The MTC website describes English as “a story of falling in love with your own voice”.

It’s also a play that speaks deeply to Geransar’s own experience. She plays Marjan, the teacher in a small Iranian classroom of adult students learning to speak English. They’re all in it for different reasons – to seek opportunities abroad, to be closer to family members living halfway around the world. What gradually becomes apparent, however, is that what you can say dramatically circumscribes who you can be.

Your identity goes out into the world, says Geransar, through “the way you describe something, the way you express yourself, being able to make a joke”.

“When you’re not fluent in a language it’s so difficult because it’s not just about expressing yourself but about understanding others.”

Many people think that learning a new language will open up worlds of possibility, but in practice – at first, at least – the opposite is true. Taking your first baby steps in an unfamiliar tongue reduces you to infant status, unable to communicate even the most basic thoughts. It instantly comes crashing home how much we take our words for granted, and how enfeebled our lives are when we can’t express ourselves fully.

This is the essential drama that Toossi’s play conveys so well: language is more than just a dictionary. Until we’re fluent in a foreign language, we can’t get punchlines, pick up innuendo or reveal complex feelings. You might be a brain surgeon or rocket scientist back home, but robbed of words, we’re all transformed into third-rate mimes.

The poignancy of playing the teacher in English, for Geransar, comes from the fact that she grew up speaking nothing but. “I was born in Iran but grew up in Australia speaking only English. I learned Farsi as an adult but it’s not at the same fluency as most Iranians who have grown up outside of Iran. The reason why mum only ever spoke English with us is that she was doing her best for us to assimilate.”

I didn’t really understand until I was much older the sacrifices my mum made to get us here.

Geransar has been back to Iran a few times over the years. “Each time I go back there’s a sense of what I’ve been missing.”

She’s also developed an understanding of what it must have meant to leave. “I didn’t really understand until I was much older the sacrifices my mum made to get us here. That’s what the play is about as well, making sacrifices and understanding that that’s what it takes to be able to create a new life for yourself, to be able to fit in and belong.”

Geransar went through something similar when she packed up her life in Australia and moved to the US to pursue her acting career. “I lived in LA for close to five years and most of my extended family live in LA, so that was so wonderful not just to be able to connect with them but also reconnect back with my culture. They all celebrate Persian culture over there.”

Returning to Australia was one of the hardest moments she’s had to face in a profession not short on them. She seriously considered giving up. “My concern was that I was coming back to an industry that ... I didn’t feel like I belonged in because there were just no opportunities for me.”

But a lot can happen in five years. She arrived to find that the nature of casting in Australia had shifted, and diversity was no longer something studios feared. She earned roles in Clickbait, a miniseries exploring the dark side of social media, and Mystery Road: Origins. Now she’s making her Melbourne stage debut with one of the country’s largest theatre companies.

The fact that Geransar didn’t grow up speaking Farsi isn’t a huge challenge for her role in English. Appropriately enough for a work that explores the intricacies of language, the play takes a novel approach in the way it handles bilingualism by presenting two strands of English – one fluent and natural, the other halting. When its characters are speaking Farsi, the actors converse in regular, everyday English. When they attempt English, it has the halting, accented delivery of someone still learning the language.

In another play, this approach could be problematic. There’s a long history of comedies in which people put on thick accents to play characters with an incomplete grasp of English. It’s not a good history.

English deftly evades those pitfalls, however, and not just because the majority of its Melbourne cast is Iranian-Australian. We’re laughing with these students, not at them, because the play’s device gives us access to the way they experience their own identity as shaped by language. The characters know when they’re messing things up, and the miscommunications that result are as much a source of humour for them as they are for the audience.

For Geransar, learning Farsi as an adult has proven eye-opening. She’s past the baby steps stage and can hold her own in casual chats. “I’m able to ... speak with family members. Granted, their English is better than my Farsi, but it’s nice for them to be able to express themselves in Farsi and for us to have that conversation.”

She’s also found the rich artistic culture of Persia more readily accessible. Contemporary Iranian cinema is generally recognised as one of the most artistically significant in the world and the country is known for its poetry and music.

Recently Geransar has been reading Persian poetry written by Iranian women over the centuries, which she’ll be performing for a video installation to be displayed at the State Library in December. “It’s been wonderful exploring that and the next step, hopefully, is one day we’ll be able to read Persian poetry in Farsi. But we’ll see!”

She might have grown up feeling neither Iranian nor Australian, but cultures change just as people do. Perhaps we’re all migrants from our own pasts, with all the freedom, longing or heartbreak that might bring.

“Anyone wanting to leave their homeland in search of opportunities elsewhere will all face the same struggles,” says Geransar.

And, it turns out, she’s not the only Iranian in Australia.

“It’s so exciting to be able to bring this story to Melbourne audiences, and in particular the Persian community here in Melbourne. But it will really resonate with anyone who’s experienced having to leave everything behind and make a new life for themselves.”

English is at Southbank Theatre from July 29. https://www.mtc.com.au/