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  International Theater in Tehran: Nervous Censors and Staged Rebellions

International Theater in Tehran Nervous Censors and Staged Rebellions

By Ralf Hoppe

Part 3: Part III: The Shifting Red Line

Roberto Ciulli, the Italian from Mülheim, is a representative of a forbidden part of the world, and yet the censors and the men pulling the strings know that he manages to stick to the rules, at least to some extent. Ciulli also contributes to upholding this delicate balance by being perfectly aware of the role he plays, and yet he continues to come to Tehran. He comes here because is convinced that he is the one taking advantage of those who seek to use him, because he believes in the subversive power of the theater and because, as a self-proclaimed global diplomat, he insists that one cannot abandon a country simply because the Bushes and the Cheneys of the world say so. Ciulli sees himself as a politician playing the fool, perched in his own balancing act on the Axis of Evil.

Hossein Pakdel, on the other hand, a member of the Pasdaran who spent eight years fighting against Iraq as part of a battalion in which only two out of every 10 men returned home -- Pakdel lives on the acceptable side of society. And yet he writes the kind of play that by rights ought to be banned in Iran. Iran is a dictatorship of contradictions.

And Homajun, the wild young man with his flying soapbox, the author of the play about Daedalus and Icarus? Homajun doesn't know yet which side he'll end up on. He could very well face problems with the authorities soon. Café Godot, his ersatz Paris with its walls adorned with photos of Samuel Beckett and its potentially subversive clientele -- brooding poets and couples holding hands under rickety tables -- is a small den of resistance. Homajun is still testing the waters, but the red line could shift at any time.

What a play

At the premiere of his play, the curtain opens to a dark stage with a spotlight trained on his bizarre flying machine. The stagehands have placed it on two metal stands, allowing the contraption to spin around its vertical axis. The actors wear aviators' caps and billowing coats that constantly threaten to become entangled in all the levers and cranks. Even worse, the actors spend much of their time onstage suspended upside down, pretending to be aviators and shouting out lines about yearning -- for another life, for freedom. Ciulli, the man from Mülheim, sits in the audience with Sven Schlötcke, the manager of his theater company. The men understand little of the dialogue, and yet understanding Farsi doesn't seem to be a requirement. "What a play," says Ciulli. "We should bring it to Mülheim," says Schlötcke.

Roberto Ciulli is a respected man in the German theater world, which means a lot in an industry known for backstabbing. The son of an upper-class Milan family, Ciulli studied philosophy before going to the German city of Göttingen, where he worked his way up through the ranks of theater, working as a laborer, a lighting technician, a stagehand, an assistant director, a director and finally becoming a theater director in Cologne. Then he went to Mülheim, where he founded Germany's most unusual theater company. It is unusual for many reasons. For one, it bears the rare distinction of being profitable, thanks in part to its many guest performances in even the smallest cities. Even more unusual is the fact that Ciulli has remained loyal to his actors for decades, and that the actors have returned the favor. Most of all, the Mülheim-based theater company is probably the world's most cosmopolitan provincial theater, with a list of performance venues that reads like a geography lesson: Baghdad, Santiago de Chile, Quito, Belgrade, Bogotá, Ljubljana, Kiev, Chicago, Caracas. Tehran holds a recurring spot on that list. "I'll explain why later," says Ciulli.

Of course, experiencing Ciulli's treatment of "King Lear" is no picnic, with costumes that look like thrift shop rejects, slow-moving monologues played on a tape recorder and actors artistically droning their lines like speaking robots welded together in some Albanian factory. To add insult to injury, the teleprompter that translates the German text into Farsi breaks down during the performance. None of the members of Ciulli's Iranian audience can understand a word of what the actors are saying, and yet the only ones who leave the room are those who have to be carried out because the air in the theater is so stifling.

Despite the language barrier, the children of the dictatorship don't miss a thing. They absorb everything, every image and every scene. It must be a moving experience for Ciulli and his ensemble. After the final applause dies down, the stagehands place chairs on the stage for a panel discussion.

He remains cautious

"Ask us what you want," Ciulli says. His words are met with giggling and nervous coughs from the audience. "Ask us what you want" -- this sentence alone is sensational in Iran.

After a polite Persian question-and-answer session, a woman near the back of the theater stands up to ask a question. Keeping her eyes trained on the floor, she asks why the esteemed director kept his actors so tightly restrained. The actors, she says, didn't laugh, didn't cry and delivered their lines like automatons. Is that the director's view of life, she asks? Ciulli loves these moments, and yet he remains cautious.

Every character in this production has his limits, he says, just as every person has his limits in life. This, he adds, was one of the objectives of the piece. And yet he also wanted to show that it is possible to expand these limits. This was the lesson each character experienced during the course of the play, he says, adding that one could certainly interpret the piece from a political point of view.

This is the gist of Ciulli's response to the woman's question. And yet what the audience understands is that this man is trying to encourage them to do something, anything. There is a moment of silence in the theater -- followed by resounding applause.

From the farm to show business

Hossein Pakdel was born in Isfahan, the son of a used clothing dealer. His parents were pious and very poor. His father was illiterate, and yet Pakdel was an exceptional child -- a model pupil who managed to secure a scholarship to study agricultural science when the Shah was still in power.

The 1979 revolution was an exciting time for Pakdel. Finally the Iranians had managed to shake off American dominance and oust the Shah, that vassal of satanic big capital. Pakdel bought a gun, joined the Pasdaran and worked on dozens of committees. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out Pakdel promptly volunteered to fight for his country. After the war, he and his fellow Revolutionary Guards traveled to the country's remote villages and offered training courses for farmers in reading, preventive medical care and well-drilling. One day his work took an unusual turn and Pakdel ended up in show business.

He had hit upon the idea of producing training films for the farmers. As the quality of the films improved and they became more entertaining, he eventually concentrated exclusively on training films, and when there were no more training films to be produced he switched to pure entertainment, Iranian-style. His connections from the days of the revolution were helpful, as was the post-revolutionary custom of deriving entertainment from Koran-reciting competitions.

His play about torture premieres on the third-to-the-last day of the festival. The production is a success. The audience is moved, even though their applause is exceedingly cautious. A few important officials are in the audience, and they praise Pakdel without distancing themselves from his play. His friend from Mülheim, Roberto Ciulli, is enthusiastic.

Torture exists everywhere

Everything went smoothly, all things considered. "Mr. Pakdel, why did you write this sort of play in the first place?" he is asked. "It is an important topic." This is not an answer. "But Mr. Pakdel, couldn't this type of piece be interpreted as a condemnation of conditions in this country?" "I love my country," he insists, "and I have no intention of condemning it! My play isn't about concrete political circumstances. The topic is fear -- a poison that is spread among people. Torture exists everywhere, in Iraq, in Guantanamo…."

His response is predictable. One could ask Hossein Pakdel many questions, but he would never say anything out of line. And why should he? Perhaps the play was the most extreme thing he could do, a gamble he was willing to take to release his inner demons, and perhaps this is saying a lot for Iran. He changes subjects and talks about his children, about how proud he is of them -- as if to say that he has a great deal to lose.

On dark winter evenings Tehran is like a ghost town. Life retreats into its shell, and there isn't much to do for those without invitations to private parties. On the evening before their departure, the foreign directors, actors and theater critics sit around in the hotel lobby being served by sullen waiters, exhausted from their many performances and worn out by drinking endless cups of tea. A few actors discuss different types of beer. Ciulli talks about his first visit to Tehran, about how strange everything was and how tormenting it was, even for a patient man like Ciulli, to be forced to sit through so many bad productions. He didn't understand the language and found the country bewildering.

But then he saw an unusual play. It was a production without words, part gymnastics performance and part ballet, performed by men who had apparently been chosen because they were tall and strong and sinister-looking. Something about the play fascinated him. There was something unusual and electrifying about the way the men acted on stage. The audience, too, was odd. Ciulli wanted to meet the actors. That, his Iranian escorts said, would be difficult, because these "actors" had to be returned to prison immediately following the performance.

The men, Ciulli discovered, had been sentenced to death. They were thieves, pimps and small-time cooks whose death sentences had been postponed for the duration of the play's performance run. This also explained the strange reactions in the audience, which included many relatives of the actors who had come to see their sons and cousins one last time, if only as actors on a stage.

"They were actually acting for their lives," says Ciulli.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan