The Salesman (2016 film) make a film until he decided his protagonists should be stage actors. Part of this decision owed to Farhadi's own background in the theatre, and his desire to re-immerse himself in that atmosphere. He also felt actors had to think of themselves as other people and create empathy, and his male protagonist would be forced to feel empathy for another man. Looking for a play within the film, Farhadi researched the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Henrik Ibsen before finding Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman", which he described as "a gift for me". In Miller's play and his script,
The Play What I Wrote Branagh. The play proved a prolonged success and earned positive reviews. Michael Billington, reviewing for "The Guardian", wrote: "The real joy of the evening, however, is that the gags come thick and fast, producing a kind of comic delirium. Matt Wolf, reviewing for "Variety", wrote "...it’s the innocence of “The Play What I Wrote” (the grammatical inaccuracy of the title is part of its point) that represents the evening’s best calling card...the evening trades in old-fashioned verbal jokes...and visual ones." It won Foley and McColl a joint Best Actor nomination at the 2002 Laurence Olivier Awards and, although they did