Rest Grant unto Him/Her Who Become More Knowledgeable & Wiser With Every Wisdom

Alireza Ghasemkhan: “Majlis-e Zarbatzadan” received  contradictory reactions when it was published by Bahram Beyzaie in 2002. This article aims to take a glance at the play, dealing with a few aspects.

At first glance, Mohammad Rahmanian, director of “Majlis-e Zarbatzadan" (a play about the martyrdom of the first Shia Imam Ali (AS, is inspired by Iran’s Ta’zieh plays, in which the martyrs of Shia Islam are mourned, in designing the stage. This gives the play an Iranian ambience. Such kinds of plays (Ta’zieh) are build up upon some characteristics that the article is going to refer to some of them.

Majority of Ta’zieh plays are staged on circle plateaus where seated audience surrond them. However, “Majlis-e Zarbatzadan” is being staged in Tehran’s main theater venue at the City Theater, which is designed classically. Such design could deprive the audience of the feeling of a Ta’zieh play. But the director has found a new way to give the audience such a feeling. It has designed a portable, circle plateau on the stage. This is inspired by the writing style of Mr Beyzaie who entangles two events in parallel, one belongs to the past and the other happens now.

Also, the literature of the play is outstanding. The wordings are in limbo between a sophisticated and complicated language, which is adapted from religious texts, and the daily conversations, which is talked by the lead actors such as the director, the writer and other executive agents.

Mr Beyzaie is taking the audience to two separate worlds by choosing different literature. He guides the audience to distance the two worlds.

The writer in “Majlis-e Zarbatzadan” is trying to share the issue of [the ban] in picturing or humanizing the sacred figures in the Shia Islam in general or in particular. The ban causes that the picture of [Imam Ali] who is the symbol of all goodness not to be humanized while the antagonists in religious history are pictured easily. This is while the acts of antagonists could not be shown either due to their negative impacts. Now what will be left to be played. This is a question Beyzaie is trying to find an answer through his play that will lead the audience to criticizing the history of theater in Iran. Beyzaie knows that there were solutions for the problem in the past, especially in Ta’zieh plays. The form of Ta’zieh is getting so prevalent in the Rahmanian’s play that the audience could see the active presence of Moeen ol-Bok -- a coordinator of the intensity of agony and pain played by actors in Ta’zieh plays – everywhere. But he is present in Rahmanian’s play with a modern dress.

The other feature of the play is the apparent distance between audience and the actors, which gets close and far during the performance. They come among the audience in some scenes, walk and talk to them. The actress who plays the writer of the play talks to audience, asking them “Is he among you?” She looks for him among the audience with a flashlight. The gesture breaks the classic ambience of the play, inviting the audience to judge, mulling over a character who is the symbol of justice and love among Shia Iranians.     

Music, which is either played live or sometimes recorded, assists the dance-like scenes of war a lot. Fardin Khalatbari, the composer of the play, and Mr Rahmanian, are to be praised for using the music enough.

We are getting used to employment of videos in plays directed by Mr Rahmanian. This has turned into a theatre element for him. Minutes of the writer doing shopping and daily life are seen in the screen behind the actors. There are also burned shots of someone sitting in a car next to the female writer. There are other visual elements too that broaden the world of dramatic art.

Another point is that the writer is played by a man in Mr Beyzaie’s play while it is played by an actress in Mr Rahmanian’s performance. This raises a question whether Mr Rahmanian is trying to draw the attention to the society’s silent half of the population? Is he going to address the issue of plurality in the Iranian society? The different voices presented in the play are too loud to be ignored.

At the second glance, the article deals with the approach of the playwright. Mr Beyzaie sits in the position of questioning the approach towards a religious-historical event as the great dramatists of after the empiricism do everywhere in the world. New questions are raised by Mr Beyzaie to have a more real picture of the first Shia Imam Ali (AS) and his martyrdom. Beyzaie is dealing with several challenges to make audience rethink about the martyrdom of the imam which happened about 1,400 years ago. He is trying to make the audience think about the truth, justice, poverty, rights of the lower layers of the society and loyalty and any divine/humane characteristic, which are raised in “Majlis-e Zarbatzadan”. This is why the justice-seeking soul of Imam Ali (AS) is eternally alive to answer these questions.

Part of the play by Beyzaie reads, “…a person, who has no picture, has no play.” But it can be said that the splendid picture of Imam Ali (AS) shows the truth-seeking people the ropes.