Under the Shadow review – Leila Farzad is fantastic in this nerve-shredding tale of 80s Tehran (opens in new tab)

Almeida theatre, LondonCarmen Nasr’s adaptation of the film set during the Iran-Iraq war is searing enough to feel like a 2026 livestreamReprimanded for wearing her headscarf too loosely, Shideh, a former medical student in Tehran, is warned: “A woman should be more scared of exposing herself than anything else.”Shideh has other concerns. It is 1988, the height of the Iran-Iraq war, and her husband is on the frontline, leaving her to raise their seven-year-old daughter. Shideh’s ambitions to ...