TehranAvenue | May 2004

Qermez (Red) is the name of a character that took the stage of the City Theater in a play written and directed by Mohammad Yaghoubee, a well-known playwright in the Tehran theater scene. Yaghoubee’s name has appeared next to many plays in recent years, including the well-attended A Minute of Silence (2001), which boldly chose as theme the serial killing of writers in mid-eighties by rogue elements in the Ministry of Information.

Yaghoubee’s latest, Red and the Rest, also focuses on various social themes from a realistic angle.  The story is set in a park, which functions as a focal point of several subplots. The stage has made the park setting so accessible to the viewer that it is impossible to imagine these characters meeting at any other place. Social themes find dramatic development on the benches of the park, with outcasts and pariahs peopling. Still, stage trappings could’ve used a surrealistic touch to give the story a different impact (I would’ve used mutilated, truncated trees to reflect the social setting).

The video projection did damage to the dramaturgy. The play could’ve easily done without it. With it, on the other hand, the lives of the characters were projected onto a different, and not necessarily dramatic, domain. Perhaps the dramaturge had better leave room for the audience’s imagination to play with the subplots.

The narrative is everyday and without many ups and downs, which is in-itself fine, but in Red and the Rest there is no suspense, crisis, or denouement. This is perhaps to make the audience feel for the banality of social life, but then even a small change in the rhythm of the play would’ve taken the audience a long way and made the play more interesting.

Looked at retrospectively, the subplots did not form a whole. None of the characters fulfilled an evolutionary progression. Even the main character, Qermez, did not escape this fate. The play could’ve gone on for another year or thirty minutes without any totalizing focal narrative. None of the characters were essential to the development of the play. It is only the opening scene that is attractive and seems to point to a higher order – the scene where Qermez, in his all-red outfit (symbol of love, life, or death), is holding a cardboard with a suicide note on it.

The character of Qermez was given special prominence from the beginning. As the protagonist, the character is even given the power to resolve some of the conflicts within the play, but in the final analysis, there is little transcending difference between Qermez and other characters of the play. Khorous (Rooster), for example, could’ve easily taken his seat, or even the young poet. Nor did the stylized acting allow full character development.

Perhaps the only significant interaction in Red and the Rest is that of the woman and her husband’s companion, which had current-day appeal. Other characters were commonplace at best, revolving around types that may have had their appeal couple of years ago (runaway girls, addicts, those contemplating migration, etc.) but they are the stuff of sociologist today.