Theatre night:Wish You Were Here.

"How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year. Running over the same old ground, what have we found? The same old fears, wish you were here" - Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

I have no idea if playwright Sanaz Toosi or director Sepy Baghaei are familiar with Pink Floyd's (very famous) 1975 meditation on absence, loss, and friendship but I do know that their play, which shared a title - Wish You Were Here - with that song, touched on very similar themes indeed. I went to see it at The Gate Theatre near Mornington Crescent yesterday evening and it was a very worthwhile and, eventually, quite emotional experience.

Nazanin (Afsaneh Dehrouyen), Zari (Maryam Grace), Rana (Juliette Motamed), Shideh (Isabella Nefar), and Salme (Emily Renee) are five young friends who have grown up together in pre-revolutionary Iran and like to play backgammon, smoke cigarettes, drink chai and sharbat together, and, most of all it seems, make rude jokes. A 'pussy audit' crops up pretty early on and yeast infections and discussions about the penis veins are not far behind.

They are, despite all they share, very different characters. Salme, soon to be wed, is quiet and obedient and though she laughs at the bawdy jokes she tends not to make them, Shideh is studious and dreams of moving to America, Zari is a ball of fun who doesn't take life too seriously, Nazanin is a thornier character with a tendency to roll her eyes when the others don't meet her exacting standards, and Rana is as fun-loving as the rest of them, maybe more, but she's a Jew. Which isn't a big deal to begin with.

They have the kind of friendship that people often form at that stage in their lives. They spend more time together than they seem to with anyone else and they've grown up together. They know each other, it seems, in and out and though events will take some of them away from the group for long periods of time they will remain in each other's thoughts and feelings even where they're not in their presence.

It's a rites of passage play but it's set in a period that spans the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the First Gulf War. Both Jimmy Carter and Saddam Hussein get a mention and a television in the corner of the sparse set (a couch, a rug, a mannequin, some cushions, and said television) reminds us of which year we're in as we see the young women discuss upcoming weddings, emigration, studies, war, and death.

Each of the five women feel both very real and multi-faceted and it feels as if we witness them growing up in real time. I couldn't help feel moved as their separate journeys drove them apart and back together again and not just their own individual journeys but the emotional journeys they join their friends on and the complicated one they have with their homeland at a time of great strife.

There's one particularly poignant moment, painfully timely right now, when a young Muslim woman and a young Jewish woman talk about how they will not let circumstances, or religion, pull them apart (it was also instructive to witness an audience that was about 80% female and had a very strong ethnic mix) but, ultimately, the story was about friendship and the great strain that world events, as well as personal events, can put on friendships. You certainly come away from Wish You Were Here wanting to stay closer than ever to your friends. There were plenty of mine I wished were there.