Theatre
Reviews
THE LENINGRAD SEIGE Tron leatw, Glasgow. Thu 167-8.“ 18 FM)
HEID Tron. Glasgow. Tue 7 Feb. then touring
lil Al )INM LOVE’S FIRE Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 24 Feb
We tend these days to have preformed for us any image we conjure up of the Middle East. The whole region has been recreated in the imaginative space in our minds as a place of chaos and violence full of wildly exotic and irrational religious and cultural doctrines. Gunmen and wide—eyed Mullahs replace people living everyday lives, going to work, school and the shops. The latter image rather than the former is a more real picture, of course, but the media would not have it so. We need for the purposes of colonisation to Orientalise people, as Edward Said‘s phrase put it; render them strange, exotic - other — in order to make them sufficiently non- human to barbarise them.
In this cultural climate, it is important that other voices, different cultural discourses, are articulated. These folk are no more represented by the media‘s recreation of them than George W Bush is representative of you or me. It‘s important, then, that Zendeh, Nazli Tabatabai‘s young company. open alternative stories to the mediated image of the world we witness on the box. In Stephen Gaythorpe‘s Love's Fire we see another imaginative recreation, but this time something that reflects a common bond of humanity between cultures, a love story. Strange, isn‘t it, given all the stories we can currently access on the mass media about Iran that we don‘t see this kind of narrative? Ask yourself why.
In this piece, the 11th century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi is seen in the process of creating an epic love poem. Haunted by grief for his dead wife, he turns to poetry for guidance and produces ‘Layli and Majnun‘, an epic love poem. Currently in process, this reading will feature readings of fragments of poetry in their original Farsi, as well as a story of love‘s struggle against cynical experience of the world. If you don‘t Orientalise the process, you might find it says something about love to you, too. (Steve Cramer)
MACK AND MABEL
King's Theatre, Edinburgh. run ended 00.
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