Smart Direction, Sophisticated & Fast Tempo

Jaber Qasemali, script writer and former head of Iran Script Writers Society, has written a review after watching “Anna Karenina”, a play written and directed by Arash Abbasi. The piece is on stage at Pardis Theater Complex at 19: every day except for Saturdays in which Masoumeh Rahmani and Behnam Sharafi star.  

“Anna Karenina”, which is written and directed by Arash Abbasi, takes audience by surprise in its very first moments when it raises the encounter between a successful TV presenter of a talk show with a woman who used to be in love.

What comes next is the broadening of this amazing idea in an interesting set. Arash Abbasi is successful in picturing this painful and sometime unequal encounter of the two characters. It makes a proper and acceptable performance and somehow shining moments.   

In other words, he employs all overt and covert techniques for the performance to influence the audience as he understands potentials of this theatrical situation well. Potentials include playing, back-and-forth dialogs, using television camera and …. Tapping these potentials helped him to make a warm and dynamic play by to the very end of the play.   

When Woody takes off his coat in protest and sets aside microphone, the plays loses its fast rhythm…Also, the ending is not as rational and emotional for the audience as it is for the characters. It is why spectators feel broken at the final scene.

However, I liked Arash Abbasi’s “Anna Karenina” not only for its enviable idea but also for its warm text and adorable acting. Abbasi has smartly used the media spotlight on the private lives of the celebrities. However, it is not much important that it reminds us of ambience of Eric-Emmanuelle Schmitt’s “Enigmatic Variations”.

This is a good point for this young writer and director who could take a glance at painful relationships of humans-- a global matter. No matter that Eric-Emmanuelle Schmitt had revealed other aspects of such relationships before.