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 orthopedist 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 show’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 only be assembled and rehearsed virtually, with lost weeks of rehearsal time due to spotty internet connection.