Andrew Haydon
posted 12 October 2006

30 Bird Theatre Company's The Persian Revolution begins with one of the cast reading the Tintin adventure Destination Moon. How, asks the show's pre-publicity material, is this linked with the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the anniversary of which this production marks?

The premise of The Persian Revolution is pretty ambitious; it sets out to present the whole chain of events leading up to the 1906-1911 revolution - seen by many as the birth of Iranian democracy, such as it is - starting with the tyrannies under the previous Shah and an examination of the many religious conflicts, as well as a whole sequence of events for what seems like most of 1905 and 1906. Unfortunately, with only a cast of six, and so many hundreds of parts to perform, all but the most central players get lost in a generalised melange of caricature and orientalism.

The script commits just about every sin available to historical dramas, from the over-long, utterly implausible expositionary dialogue ('Of course you remember Mrs Such-and-such, you first met in 1899, on a trip to the Congo, during which you said… and she said…' etc) to the hopeless attempts to cram in every single event that happened in hundreds of minute-long scenes. As if trying to counter this cinematic style, the director Mehrdad Seyf (also the writer) adds an attempt at physical theatre, deploying modishly non-naturalistic sculptural pieces of set which are trundled about the stage, with the cast gingerly throwing shapes upon them. Sadly there is no apparent understanding of how physical theatre works, so we see the cast reduced to pretending to be soldiers crawling around a battleground to a sound-effects tape of gunfire, and other bouts of clumsy mimetic literalism. Similarly there is a clear absence of a dramaturgical eye; to establish that the missionaries are Christian, do we really need them to recite the whole of the Lord's Prayer, for example?

At the end, we are returned to the Tintin reader with her book, and the rest of the cast pop their heads above the wonky set to read lines from a scene in which Professor Calculus, Captain Haddock et al discover a uranium enrichment plant in a fictional country, with Captain Haddock remarking: 'An atomic research centre in this land of savages?' Ho-ho, we think, is this fearless company trying to draw parallels between the colonial doodlings of a Belgian racist and our own vexed times in the Middle East? Apparently so. The rationale for slipping in this epilogue appears to be that, having seen the whole of the 1906 revolution played out, we should now conclude that Iran is too savage, superstitious and unstable a country to ever be allowed nuclear capabilities. It is unusual, to say the least, to find such firmly neocon conclusions presented in a London theatre. Perhaps this is not the intention, but in a show so far from being in control of its material that at the performance I saw someone behind me was moved to hiss 'bollocks', very loudly, during one scene with which he disagreed, it is impossible to tell.

The thesis is backed up by a speech made by a soon-to-be executed cleric shortly before the epilogue: 'The constitution will fail. The Shah, with all his shortcomings, remained a Muslim. The constitutionalists resorted to Christian and Babi values to create a new law. They're dazzled by the glories of the Industrial Age. They have renounced God in favour of their new idols. Islam is the bone and fibre of this land. Kill as many of us as you like, but Islam will remain. It flows in our people's blood, it rests in their hearts, and though most of them cannot read or write, it brightens their mind'.

As the show has been written by an Iranian, what we are ultimately witnessing is a man's argument with his country, but it is precisely this sort of cynicism which is shared by America and her allies. It is an uncomfortable thought that, in trying to address a difficult problem intelligently, Seyf has unwittingly provided grist to the mill of those who have no such high-minded concerns with comprehension, preferring to deploy bone-headed military might as a catch-all solution to any perceived problems.

Till 14 October 2006