Set in a high-pressure Mayfair fashion atelier, Where There Is No Time explores the cost of ambition in the modern fashion world. The play centres on Yusuf, a British Iranian-Yemeni designer preparing a career-defining collection while navigating competing pressures of heritage, commerce, and creative control. We sat down with Mohammedally Hashemi to discuss their upcoming performance.
Where There Is No Time plays at Seven Dials Playhouse from 17–28 March 2026. Tickets are available here.
What inspired you to set Where There Is No Time within the fashion world, and how does that environment sharpen the play’s exploration of ambition and identity?
I was drawn to the fashion world because it’s a space where image, ego and vulnerability are all constantly on display. It felt like the perfect pressure-cooker for a story about someone trying to define themselves while the world is busy defining them for its own purposes.
In that environment, ambition is always heightened: every show, every collection, every campaign is a test of worth, relevance and legacy. For Yusuf, that world exposes the fault lines between who he is, who his family expects him to be, and who the industry wants him to become. By setting the play in fashion, I could sharpen questions of identity, heritage and compromise in a world obsessed with surfaces, where the cost of success is often paid for in very private, internal ways.
How did your own British Iranian-Yemeni heritage shape Yusuf’s character and the emotional stakes of his creative journey?
A lot of it does. As a British-Iranian-Yemeni actor, writer and producer, I’ve absorbed so many conversations and contradictions around identity, success and representation, and I’ve poured those observations into this play. I’m very conscious of how tempting it can be to profit from pain and politics, especially when the industry often rewards artists for taking very visible stances on certain issues, like the situation in Iran.
For me, it feels honest only when it comes from a genuinely personal place, not because it’s fashionable or financially advantageous. The problem is that, from the outside, there are always people who see the economic value in that pain, and that can make even sincere work appear inauthentic. Yusuf’s struggle with heritage and commerce is my way of interrogating that tension: how do you honour where you come from and what you believe, without allowing your story, or your politics, to be packaged and sold back to you.
The play wrestles with the idea of sanitising culture for commercial success — what conversations are you hoping audiences will leave the theatre having about that tension?
I don’t think that part is really up to me. Once the play is in front of an audience, it belongs to them, and what they take away will always be coloured by their own lives, experiences and questions.
What I hope is that it stirs something in them — whether that’s reflection, discomfort, recognition or simply the feeling of having been immersed in a world that stays with them on the way home. The rehearsals are for us, but the show is for them, so above all I just want them to have a good time in the theatre
What has it been like to write and perform such a personal story simultaneously, and how do those roles inform each other in rehearsal?
It’s a completely different experience speaking words you’ve written yourself. As an actor, you’re usually interpreting someone else’s truth; here, I’m carrying my own, and that brings a strange mix of vulnerability and power.
In rehearsal, the writer and actor in me are constantly in dialogue. If something feels false in my mouth, I can adjust it in real time, and if a moment unexpectedly lands emotionally, I can deepen it on the page. There’s a real sense of freedom in that — complete freedom — because the text and performance are evolving together, and I don’t feel bound by anyone’s rules but the story’s.
In portraying the pressures of perfectionism and legacy, how did you approach showing the psychological cost of creative success on stage?
We approached it by letting the audience feel Yusuf’s unraveling in real time, through his body, his silences, and the mounting chaos around him. The toll is intense: he’s desperately clinging to the innocent passion that first drove him, even as he’s forced to make ruthless calls to save his company and secure its future.
On stage, we show that psychological cost not through exposition, but in fractured rhythms — moments where his polished facade cracks, where private doubts spill into public spaces, and where the weight of legacy starts to physically bend him. It’s about making visible the quiet violence of perfectionism: how success doesn’t just demand your time or talent, but starts to hollow out the very joy that fuelled it.
As an emerging playwright moving from film into theatre, what possibilities does live performance offer you that other mediums don’t?
Live performance is its own electric animal—like stand-up comedy, where you’re learning in real time exactly how the writing lands with an audience, breath by breath, laugh by laugh, silence by silence.
There’s nothing more beautiful than that immediacy: you can feel what resonates, what needs sharpening, what shifts a room, and it teaches you more about your own work in one night than months of editing ever could. Theatre gives me that raw, unfiltered dialogue with the crowd that film, with all its control, just can’t replicate.