2015CINEMA_ANV19 August, 1978. 8:21pm. Abadan, Iran. Nearly 500 people sit down to watch Masoud Kimiai’s 1974 film Gavaznha in the Cinema Rex. What follows is one of the most deadly terrorist attacks of the late twentieth century, killing at least 470 people and sparking the Iranian Revolution.

This tragic event has been virtually undocumented by Western news, dwarfed by giants such as 9/11: on which most people in the West base their view of terrorist attacks. With Steven Gaythorpe’s Cinema comes a humbling insight into the fact that terrorism is a threat to every single corner of society.

Cinema does take a while to get going. But as our host leads us through the final moments of the victims, the last fifteen minutes or so of Cinema veer close to being genuinely heartbreaking. There’s just one huge obstacle I cannot seem to get past: Cinema is narrated by a cat.

It’s certainly an interesting concept, having a cat as our narrator. Perhaps it would work given another subject matter, or if the show was a comedy. Perhaps it’s an aim to make the performance more multi-faceted or unique. But Cinema doesn’t need this. The events surrounding the Cinema Rex fire are resonant enough on their own, and the choice of using a cat to narrate seems childish in comparison. It also breaks it up too much; when the play concerns the deaths of nearly 500 people, we don’t really care about the nine different lives of the feline Shahrzad.

Cinema ends up being 30% poignant memorial to the dead and 70% auto-biography of an Iranian cat, and it’s hard to feel to emotionally invested in something that’s narrated by an animal.

Cinema is playing at the Northern Stage @ Summerhall (venue 26b) until August 30. For more information, visit the Fringe website.