It’s always heartening when artists remember their roots. For many artists, where they come from is an indelible part of who they are and the work they make. Think of Hockney, at home in the Hollywood Hills and casting his eye always back home to Bradford, or Alan Bennett, a member of the London Literati for decades and yet the stories remain resolutely Leodensian.

Javaad Alipoor continues this tradition while talking about his latest show describing himself as a ‘Manchester-based, Bradford-built artist, writer and performer’. He’s not latching on to the city post the announcement that it is to be the UK’s City of Culture for 2025. There is a certain amount of cultural cache, now, that comes from saying ‘born’ or indeed ‘built’ in Bradford, but for some of us the Bradfordian tag is one that we’ve worn with pride for a long time.

I first met Alipoor over a decade ago. We would often see each other in the artistic hotspot of Theatre in the Mill, based on the Bradford University campus and a place that encouraged artists to find boundaries at which they could push. Alipoor kept on pushing. From the start, his work has been challenging and never less than interesting.

His latest piece completes a trilogy that began with The Believers Are But Brothers in 2017, more of which in a moment. The finale of the three that make up the trilogy opened in Manchester this week before travelling to London next week. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World continues Alipoor’s penchant for seemingly opaque show titles and labyrinthine explorations of the world. His shows exist in the world and style of Adam Curtis documentaries, exploring big ideas through seemingly unconnected moments in world history.

Raam Emami (King Raam) in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a Javaad Alipoor Company production. Picture: Chris Payne.

Alipoor describes Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World as ‘a kaleidoscopic theatrical investigation into the unsolved murder of legendary Iranian singer, Tom Jones-esque showman and sex symbol, Fereydoun Farrokhzad’. Like I say, there is always a lot going on.

“When I started researching the story of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, I came to realise that his murder is the beginning of a series of events that still haunt us today,” he says. “As the relationship between the Global North and the Global South has shifted, so too has the old sense of the West as a safe place where dissidents can escape to. Put simply, you might leave the dictatorship, but the dictatorship won’t leave you.”

Things Hidden… to give the piece its more manageable title, follows Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, which premiered at Theatre in the Mill in July 2019, before going on to win a Fringe First at that year’s Edinburgh Fringe. The trilogy began in 2017 with The Believers Are But Brothers, the piece that introduced the world to The Javaad Alipoor Company. He cut his teeth at Theatre in the Mill and had served as resident associate director at Sheffield Theatres where he directed a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Believers are But Brothers looked, broadly, at the radicalisation of young men via the internet. Like the show that followed it in the trilogy, it won the theatre maker a Fringe First.

Javaad Alipoor in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a Javaad Alipoor Company production. Picture: Chris Payne

Sharing writing credits with a fellow Yorkshire theatre maker, Chris Thorpe, the latest piece explores familiar territory, taking a ride through the rabbit hole of the internet via Wikipedia and murder mystery podcasts to examine a clutch of competing theories about the final days of a charismatic entertainer murdered in exile.

In the mid 1970s Fereydoun Farrokhzad was at the height of his fame. Forced to flee his homeland after the 1979 Revolution, Farrokhzad settled in Germany but continued to perform to his fans from afar. Though he had frequently challenged taboos and conservatism within Iranian society during his career in Tehran, in exile Farrokhzad became a scathing critic of the regime. On 7 August 1992, he was found murdered in his small flat in Bonn.

“I knew I wanted this last part to stand alone whilst speaking to the relationship between politics and technology, history and the present that has been the thread connecting all three plays,” says Alipoor.

“I wanted to make work that shows the role that theatre has to play in a civil society and democracy, that nothing else can really match. But I want this trilogy to show that theatre can do something vital that no other kind of art can do; it can show us how we are all connected.”

At Home, Manchester, to November 5. Battersea Arts Centre, November 9-26.

Bradford theatre maker Javaad Alipoor's latest production Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World