Slowly but surely

By Nehad Selaiha
When the pilot announced we were about to land at Tehran airport there was a sudden, intense flurry of activity. Many passengers started calling the stewards and stewardesses for a final drink before the big drought and most of the women were frantically reaching into their handbags for scarves, shawls and abayas. Vanya Exerjian, Madiha and Layla, the three female performers accompanying Al-Warsha -- the first Egyptian theatre troupe ever to visit Iran -- were hardly recognisable. Clad in folds of voluminous black from top to toe they needed, as one male member of the group noted, tags to identify them. Thoughtful Vanya, having known me for years, had brought along an extra abaya in case the absent-minded professor had forgotten exactly where she was going. Luckily, my daughter had consulted a web site which listed the do's and don'ts for prospective Iran visitors. Black was not mandatory, it said: all that was required was that women should be completely and loosely covered except for the face and hands. The colour of the cover was unspecified. When I emerged from the plane, I was in a baggy, ankle-length coat which I kept tripping over and a printed silk scarf which kept slipping dangerously backwards though tightly knotted under the chin and carefully fastened with pins. German critic Renate Klett, another guest of the festival, told me later at the hotel that she had rehearsed with the scarf for a whole week at home, keeping it on all the time. I wished I had done the same.
I also wished somebody had warned me that men and women were not supposed to shake hands in Iran. Outside the airport we were met by a lot of people from the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Dramatic Arts Centre. Also waiting for us was Egyptian consular Youssef Mekkawi who, together with ambassador Mohamed Rifa'a (the grandson 0f Rifa'a El-Tahtawi, that most enlightened of Azharite 'Ulemas in 19th century Egypt), runs the Egyptian interests bureau in Tehran. Feeling a bit tense and insecure in my new getup -- like an actress thrust on stage in an awkward, complicated costume without a dress rehearsal -- I needed the reassurance of a friendly hand. I eagerly shook hands with the Egyptian consular and his companion and proceeded to do likewise with our Iranian hosts. It took me a few seconds to realise that my hand was hanging in mid-air and quickly stuffed the offending limb in my pocket.
In the special car assigned for me (an unwelcome honour at that moment since in my confused, embarrassed state I badly needed the company and comfort of my Al-Warsha friends), my escort asked politely, in a sheepish whisper, if I would please cover my hair. I hastily pulled the front of my scarf forward and down until it nearly covered my eyes; but, "no...no," he said, pointing his finger to the back of my head. It transpired that an errant lock of hair had managed to break loose and creep unnoticed an inch or two under the tip of the scarf to peep at the world outside. I soon discovered that in certain circles in Tehran, educated women had wrested for themselves the right to bare a part of the top of their heads to the sky.
When I finally retired to my room at Ferdossi hotel that evening, after studying the festival programme with my escort and deciding with his help which plays I should see, I was thoroughly exhausted but could not sleep. I lay in bed trying to get over that novel and disorienting feeling that I and my body were two separate entities, wondering what the performances would be like in view of the four crippling provisos imposed by the festival. The first was, as in real life, that all female performers should observe the Islamic dress regardless of any artistic considerations and whatever the play. Lucky for Hassan El-Geretly and his Al-Warsha group that their Spinning Lives, which dramatises the first part of the popular epic known as Al-Sira Al-Hilaleya, artistically requires types of costume which fulfill this condition. In the case of the three productions of Sophocles's Antigone, from Germany, Greece and Iran, a local production of Medea and another of Macbeth, I foresaw no problems since the setting in all of them could easily accommodate the veil, might even require it, and the texts were originally performed, both in ancient Greece and Elizabethan England, without women altogether. As for the Swiss Memories, written and directed by Otto Kukla, which I had seen in Germany last year, nothing needed to be done except dress the two female performers in scarves and long dresses; it consists of film projections, live music and reading and contains minimal movement. It could come across almost intact.
My imagination ground to a halt when I reached Sierra Leone's Stubbornness in my musings. Billed as a dance drama with live drumming and male and female dancers, it not only posed the question of how to dress the African female dancers according to the first proviso without impeding their movement or sacrificing its local colour, but struck me as an open and flagrant violation of the second festival proviso which strictly forbids female dancing on stage. No female solo singing on stage either, the third proviso stipulates, while the fourth bans any physical contact whatsoever between male and female performers, not even a handshake. I pitied the two actors burdened with the parts of Caligula and his mistress, Caesonia, in an Iranian adaptation of Camus' Caligula listed in the programme. They could avoid touching throughout the whole play and the audience could accept it as a theatrical convention; but how could Caligula manage the strangulation of Caesonia at the end, as he is supposed to do, without touching her? That was the question. I fell asleep trying to puzzle it out.
That mystery still remains unsolved; a couple of days later I went to see the play, but within 25 minutes I decided I had had enough of prim, wooden Caesonia and of raving, ranting Caligula and did not care what happened to them at the end. I sneaked out at the first opportune moment with my faithful and diligent escort, Rijan, close at my heels. But the choice of leaving performances halfway through, either because they grew tedious once you were told the plot, seeming to belong more to the tradition of TV drama than to theatre, or simply because you wanted to catch another highly recommended performance, was not always available. It was possible in the case of Caligula because it took place in the largest of five small halls which, together with a main hall which seats 579, dozens of offices, a veritable maze of corridors and narrow stairways, and a cafeteria in the basement (called artists' cafe), constitute The City Theatre Complex in the centre of Teheran. It is a round, imposing and architecturally impressive building and throughout the festival it drew thousands of Iranians, the majority young men and women, eager to enjoy theatre, foreign and local, and, possibly, to gauge the level of freedom they have by what was being allowed on stage.
To my surprise, and relief, I soon discovered that the president of this year's festival (the 19th since it started and third since it went international), Dr. Majid Sharif Khodai and his team of organisers allowed theatre more freedom than one had ever expected or dared hope for -- more freedom than any previous year, according to many Iranians. The regulations forbidding female dancing and singing were bravely bent in the case of Sierra Leone's Stubbornness and two other stunningly daring (by Iranian standards) local productions. The first Puff, a translation of a feminist play by an American woman playwright (whose name I failed to discover) was rendered into Farsi and directed by the late H. Hesami; it was the first play he was allowed to direct after a 20-year-long ban and also his last; he died just before the festival when it was due to open. This sad story may partly explain the spirit of reckless defiance which permeates the whole performance and its electrifying impact on its Iranian audience. But even among foreigners, it proved a huge success and an exhilarating theatrical experience. At once serious and hilariously funny, it portrays a middle-aged, long-oppressed and battered housewife who, at the end of her tether, screams in the face of her husband for the first time in her life, wishing him to hell. Something goes "puff" as the lights go out and we see sparks and smoke. When they come on again, we see in his place a small pile of ashes and his spectacles. This sequence, performed in the style of the old silent movies, takes up a very short time, and the rest of the play shows the woman slowly grasping, with the help of a neighbour, another oppressed wife, and two bottles of wine, her new-found freedom, her growing self-confidence and a new and thrilling awareness of her body. When her body begins to move involuntarily to the rhythm of music, she jumps up crying out, in an overwhelming burst of joy and energy, "I can dance." And she actually does, and with great gusto and abandon, grinning at the audience all the time and waving to it to join her. The rapport actress G Adine established with the audience is hard to describe and was a clear sign of a passionate longing for freedom. The play ends happily with another curse, another puff which, this time, dispatches the brutal husband of the neighbour safely to hell.
At Sangelaj Theatre, which occupies a separate small building away from the City Theatre Complex, and facing a lovely, rambling park, I watched the other Iranian performance which broke the taboo against female singing and dancing. Three Stories from the Arabian Nights is a bold and technically polished one-woman show, written and directed by Hassan-E-Khalilifar and superbly acted by Jayran Momken. It conjures up three unfortunate female characters from the Nights and replays their tragic stories in the present: a young girl forcibly married to an old man who rapes her then dies the same night; an unmarried middle-aged woman longing for love and battling against loneliness and social taboos; and finally, a young woman forced by society into prostitution and setting herself ablaze at the end to escape her sordid life. Such topics, normal in many countries and old-fashioned, perhaps, are novel and even shocking in post-revolution Iranian theatre. Also novel and exciting is the use of body language to build a visual, rebellious and cunningly subversive subtext which says more than the verbal text dares to say and speaks of the unspeakable. Though I was given only a bare outline of the stories, and could not make out a word of what Ms. Momken was saying, she managed, through her masterful control of her body and voice and her amazing emotional mobility, to speak volumes to me.
There were other one-woman shows in the festival, all Iranian and all -- like Bahjat (performed by Elika Abdorrazaqi) which portrays the ordeal of a woman on the run from her monstrous husband -- centering on the suffering of women in oppressive patriarchal societies. It was invigorating to find so many actresses defending the cause of women and protesting against the violation of their human rights. If we add to these solo performances the ones written, directed or acted exclusively by women, the 19th Fajr festival aquires a definite and pronounced feminist slant.
Nameless Maria is one of the finest products of this positive trend. Based on a poignant text by Croatian writer Lydia Skorman Horak which details the horrors suffered by women in war, especially rape, it had a cast of two women and was sensitively and poetically directed by Narjis Hashempour, herself an actress, who managed to preserve the anguished honesty of the original play while avoiding its most dangerous pitfalls. Rape surfaced again in When We Return -- an unusual and exciting play about guilt, remorse, broken dreams and impossible longings, set in the countryside of Shiraz where its makers live. It used repetition in an intriguing manner to split and merge the characters, adopted an episodic, inconsequential structure and was on the whole surrealist in mode. In a memorable scene, it presented in succession two deranged women in identical clothing, both looking for a missing cow, wearing cow-bells round their necks and accusing the same man, who once kidnapped and raped a bride, of having milked them dry. My escort described the show as erotic and pornographic. I was startled and thought he was either joking or did not know the meaning of the words he used. I carefully reviewed the play in my mind's eye, but hard as I tried I could not discover any detail that was even remotely erotic or to which the word pornography could conceivably apply. Even the role of the seductive gypsy who waylays farmers on their way home to help her partner steal their cattle was played by a man in drag. My escort later explained that he had meant the verbal text by his description and not the performance and that any reference to sex, however oblique, was generally viewed as erotic. I instantly remembered how Hassan El-Geretly, who had used the word adultery in his synopsis of Spinning Lives, was asked to replace it with a less offensive term.
The word experimental, too has a different meaning in Iran, at least among laymen. When I heard the use of live music in theatre described as experimental, I simply gaped. What's experimental about that, I asked. "It was allowed only three years ago," was the answer.
By the same criterion one could describe as experimental the moment when the long, thick and heavy wig worn by the heroine of Burnt Temple slipped off when she accidentally sat on it, revealing her real hair and causing the audience to gasp in chorus. Indeed, the genuine excitement and suspense caused by that trivial incident would be hard to match in any experimental theatre.
Of the 23 Iranian plays I saw, Stardust-Stricken (subtitled Without Dialogue) struck me as the most ambitiously experimental in most respects. The script, by Atila Psyani and Mohammad Charmshir, draws on many sources: William Gibson's Miracle Worker which dramatises the relationship of Helen Keller to her teacher Annie Sullivan; Peter Handke's Kaspar; Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson; and Sophocles's Antigone (a play that seemed to haunt the festival). At the centre of all four plays is a conflict between a pupil and a teacher, involving ideas of obedience and rebellion and the meaning of education. Pesyani, who also directed, used Gibson's play as frame and starting point then set about twisting it at every step by roping in characters, details and ideas from the other three plays. The gradual and subtle transformation of Keller and her teacher into victim and persecutor, and the switching of roles at the end, brilliantly performed and orchestrated by Fatima Naqavi and Setare Pesyani, was at once fascinating and terrifying. As the play progressed the concept of education was redefined as a process of systematic conditioning, involving torture, terrorisation and physical brutality, and designed to break the will, inculcate obedience, stifle natural feelings and obliterate individuality and difference.
Encased in a drab wire cage, and constantly flooded with images flashing on two screens, pupil and teacher grow more savage and violent; the torment can only end if one of them dies. But here, unlike Kaspar, The Lesson or Antigone, it is not the young who die. Helpless, blind, deaf and dumb Keller stabs her teacher, wrenches away part of the wire screen isolating her from the audience and steps out in a pool of light to the tune of an American pop song. The sense of relief and liberation at that moment, after the oppressive gloom, the relentless cruelty and harrowing scenes, was very much like an intimation of a new dawn.
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