2009 Fadjr Festival Iran - Like the Good Old Days

Apparently when The Rite of Spring premiered, people fainted, a woman gave birth on the spot, and the audience were so outraged that they rampaged through the theatre, ran out of doors and inadvertently started both the modern world and the first World War.  When was the last time that happened as a result of programming in the Olivier, I ask myself?

Nope. The modern western world being what it is, the most we can hope for is a mild tiff in the box office line-up:"the queue starts here, I believe" uttered through stiff lips.

I had a taste of what it might have been like in the good old days when I visited the Fadjr Festival in Iran last week.  Let me just take that sentence again.  "I had a....visited the Fadjr Festival in Iran last week."  Yep.  That is correct.  Just as the British Council was engaged in a big kerfufle, gathering its skirts and leaving Iran with accusations flying in both directions, a group of about 10 of us, without any access to the newspapers or any sense of what was actually going on, were in Tehran eating sweets and trying to survive Peter Shaffer's Amadeus in Farsi.  Actually, I was stuck in there with one other colleague, having been directed thither whilst trying vainly to get into another, apparently rather good, show.  Everyone else was smart, and decamped early.

So yes, at the Fadjr what was good was very very good, and what was bad was awful. 

However, whatever it was, good or bad, the audience were hungry for it.  Which is how I ended up getting the last available seat in an Iranian adaptation of the Bonnie and Clyde story, updated with boredom and guns and sex in hotel rooms - the latter no mean feat in a country where the censors don't allow men and women to actually touch on stage.  And the audience knew it.  There were hundreds of people outside the doors who couldn't get in.  And they yelled and pounded on the door throughout act one, making sure we who were inside knew how they felt.  And we sat in the sweltering heat, wrapped in headscarves, sharing warm bottled water, watching the gradually warping door as much as the on-stage action, thinking "so this is what it used to be like in the good old days."