My English Persian Kitchen

Out of the frying pan – a sold-out run at this year's Edinburgh Fringe – and into the fire of the Soho Theatre, writer Hannah Khalil and director Chris White bring My English Persian Kitchen, their inventive adaptation of cookery book author Atoosa Sepehr's life-story to London for a three-week run.

The one-woman performance is already underway as the audience filters into the intimate room. Our protagonist, played with equal parts chilling intensity and genuine warmth by Isabella Nefar, is dicing onions underneath a kitchen pendant light while singing to herself in Farsi.

The first line of the play stretches the fourth wall, when Nefar asks if we are surprised to see her cooking: for many it may be the first time they have seen the Persian dish ash reshteh being made on the stage, unless they attended Masterchef the Musical, but this isn't what the play's heroine is getting at. Instead, we are told that Iranian women don't cook, that more Iranian women go to university than men – and are just as successful.