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Faithful to her chosen artistic name, Saria Callas, Sara Amini’s one-woman show is a tragicomedy of thwarted dreams, cultural clashes, and maternal love. Performed at Underbelly Cowgate, it traces her coming of age in Tehran—where women are forbidden to sing in public—and her life as a mother in the UK, balancing her own silenced ambitions with her child’s search for identity. The “Iranian Maria Callas” she once longed to be remains an impossible fantasy, reshaped by the political and personal obstacles that have defined her journey.

Amini draws the audience into a kaleidoscope of memories, shifting seamlessly through vignettes that recall the graphic-novel style of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. With quick costume changes, playful projections, and bursts of song, she embodies the contradictions of East and West: one moment wrapped in hijab, the next in dazzling technicolour, slipping from solemnity into parody with disarming ease.

One of the show’s most striking sequences begins with her lament at being barred from the school choir because she was a girl. Instead, she recalls, the closest role available was calling the azan, the prayer call. Climbing onto a table, Amini unleashes a soaring invocation before peeling off her headscarf to launch into the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Just as her voice takes flight, she is pulled back to the call to prayer—a brilliant encapsulation of repression, resilience, and absurdity.

Elsewhere, projected images of Iranian schoolgirls drilled in modesty rules accompany a hilariously dark recollection: teachers warned that if a strand of hair slipped out, God would drag them to hell by it. Amini, ever mischievous, reasoned she might as well leave larger tufts exposed—so at least it wouldn’t hurt as much.

But the humour is edged with vulnerability. As a mother in London, Amini faces her son’s questions about gender identity, a struggle she receives with love but also with echoes of her own repression. She recalls a wedding in Iran, where her father chastised her son for “dancing like a woman.” Her son, she confesses, now refuses to ever return.

The show’s finale swells with defiance: Queen’s I Want to Break Free blasts across the stage. Just as Amini seems ready to sing, the lights cut out. The silence is deafening, a haunting reminder of freedoms denied—and the fight still unfinished.