At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Tehran?
Every January, Iran celebrates its Revolution of 1979 with a theatre festival and a film festival. This year’s Fajr theatre festival was on as big a scale as ever, an intense ten days in which over a hundred performances are given in fourteen indoor venues and one outdoor. This year they were complemented by a theatre market, in which some forty Iranian companies offered their productions to the festival’s international visitors – almost a one-to-one relationship. The quality of materials in the market was extremely high, with every company putting out DVDs of their productions past and present. The same technical expertise showed in the arrival every day of a 24-page A3 festival newspaper, in full colour, with four pages in English, richly illustrated with shots of the previous day’s shows.
Controversy
This year, not unexpectedly, there was controversy both open and hidden over the festival. Peter Brook withdrew his production of The Grand Inquisitor, Bruce Myers’ solo from Dostoevsky, in protest at the régime, while one or two leading Iranian directors were noticeable by their absence from their country’s annual showcase. Not all of these absences were voluntary: last year saw the first independently produced show Iran has seen since the revolution, Dog Silence, which ran for 42 sell-out performances in Tehran’s newest and most fashionable theatre, the Iranshah. It was not invited to Fajr, although the festival has a section for the best shows of the previous year.
The many sections of Fajr take some understanding. There was an international competition of eighteen shows, half Iranian and half foreign, judged by an international jury (who chose largely Iranian shows for their awards). A section of ten more “International Guests” (without Mr Myers – in all honesty not a great loss) actually included six more Iranian productions alongside a Chinese opera and some Russian clowns. Then there was “Theatre of Nations”, featuring troupes from neighbouring countries mingled with ones from South America. The “Guest” section consisted of already successful Iranian productions, twelve of them, but so did “Festival of Festivals” (ten) and “Best of Regional Festivals” (eleven more).
Frustrating
This left “Iranian Theatre Panorama in 2010” and “New Experiences”, which I and my colleagues on the second jury, invited by the Iranian section of the International Association of Theatre Critics, were asked to judge. We saw twenty-two shows of varying quality, a full timetable that meant we took in only a couple of productions outside our remit, and none of the international shows. Here we were not seriously deprived, since it is fair to say that most of the international visitors were not in the class one expects to see at a major world festival. It was more frustrating to miss some of the bigger Iranian shows, including versions of classics such as King Lear and Macbeth, as well as Camus’ Caligula, Brecht’s Galileo and Dürrenmatt’s Romulus The Great. Students of theatre’s resistance to oppressive regimes may find some of these titles familiar.
I did get to see a play by one of Iran’s leading directors, AmirReza Koohestami, who lives in France and (perhaps as a result) is able to tour widely in Europe. Where Were You On January 8th is conducted almost entirely in cellphone conversations – and thus probably more suited to radio – but its story of panic over a stolen weapon, and its consequences for all the participants, is well and energetically told. By a freak of programming, our jury saw no less than three productions involving another Iranian known to foreign audiences. Attila Pesyani directed his own solo show, an account of a disturbing dream that showed affinities with Robert Lepage in its inventive use of objects, and supplied the text for two more very different pieces, a trendy multi-media visit to the coke-snorting classes of Tehran and an old-fashioned but charming comedy about a theatre owner desperate to play Macbeth but plagued by three witchy wives. One had the uneasy feeling that one fully worked play would have been a better advertisement for Mr Pesyani’s undoubted talents than these three squibs.
Theocratic
From the widely disparate sample offered to our critics’ jury it is possible to derive some general thoughts about Iranian theatre today. The first is that in spite of their considerable interest in Western theatre, classic and to a lesser extent modern, they still lean to very strong traditions of their own. Several of the productions we saw were faithful revisits to, or modern musings on the great poetic heritage (Khayyam, Hafez, Ferdosi) that Iran can boast. Others dwelt on aspects of the war against Iraq that quickly followed the 1979 revolution, which still remains raw in Iranian minds after a decade of shaky peace. In dramatising anything, Iran’s theatremakers are of course bound by the rigorously imposed rules of their theocratic masters: no touching between members of the opposite sex, all women to be modestly dressed, heads covered at all times and so on. The ingenuity with which they overcome these obstacles is often remarkable – and before we tut-tut too much at these restrictions, let us note that smoking is completely permitted on Iranian stages, and Iranian actors can still black up to play one of their archetypal figures, the court jester. Different thought police, different taboos. It’s also very easy to see protest where there may be none, though there was undoubtedly a strong rebellious undercurrent running through the whole festival. Green, the colour of the opposition, made regular appearances in costumes and settings, but green is also the colour of one of the Prophet’s followers, who was being celebrated in more than one of the plays seen.
Revelation
Overall, I came away disappointed in Iran’s dramatists, most of whom seem locked in a religious past, but much heartened by their actors, many of whom showed outstanding talent. Our jury gave its Best Play award to Mr Pesyani’s techno-piece, which was certainly a novelty on local stages. But the production that impressed us most was a danced Othello, in which the commitment and energy of the entire cast – who are not officially allowed to dance on stage – was a revelation.
Ian Herbert ian@herbertknott.com