Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✭✭✩
by Abas Na'lbandian, translated by Soheil Parsa and Peter Farbridge, directed by Soheil Parsa
Modern Times Stage Company, Artword Theatre, Toronto
November 5-23, 2003
The latest offering from Soheil Parsa's Modern Times Stage Company, Stories... by Abas Na'lbandian (1947-1989), marks the first time the 1977 play has been presented either inside or outside Iran. Na'lbandian had the misfortune to be thought too formalist before the Revolution and too subversive after it, despairing after repeated incarcerations of ever finding an audience and finally committing suicide.
Stories..., an intriguing 75-minute experiment in dramatic form, is made of five short, interconnected plays. Each play works likes a Möbius strip, first presenting one side of a seemingly realistic situation but gradually revealing a reverse view of the same scene and questioning whether either version is real. A man dies during sex with a young woman, but when both mother and daughter recall the event, each sees the other as the woman involved. A schoolmaster interrogates a boy about a man he met. The boy eventually narrates a dream in which the man is the schoolmaster who interrogates him about the man he met. The first four episodes build in mystery as we try to piece together recurring motifs of corpses, shared food, reversals of power. There is humour but the tone is baleful as if all holds on reality were giving way. The fifth episode, at least as presented in this adaptation, is the weakest, coming off like a transparent riff on Waiting for Godot and deflating the accumulated tension.
Andrea Lundy's surprising shifts in lighting and Thomas Payne's ominous sound design amplify the work's sense of disorientation. Parsa's precise direction is expert in creating enigmatic tableaux. Andrew Scorer and Stavroula Logothettis, each in two roles, are best at adopting the distanced mode of acting the piece demands, but John Gilbert as a dying father, Stewart Arnott as the prurient schoolmaster and Daniel Karasik as the secretive schoolboy all give strong performances.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-10-02.
Photo: Andrew Scorer and Peter Farbridge. ©2003 Modern Times Stage Company.
2003-11-13
Stories from the Rains of Love and Death