Hafez Hall to host reading of satirical play on Qajar court

TEHRAN,June 23(MNA) -- Tehran’s Hafez Hall will be playing host to a reading performance of “Jijak Alishah”, a play by Zabih Behruz (1891–1971) which satirizes the Qajar court. The play has a large cast, which will be directed by Rahmat Amini on July 6. “After having spent a long time teaching Iranian dramatic literature at the university, I found that part of the history of our dramatic literature from the period of Mirza Aqa Tabrizi until the 1960s has been completely ignored,” Amini said. Mirza Aqa Tabrizi was an Iranian secretary at the French legation in Tehran, who wrote the first plays directly in Persian during the nineteenth century. “The play follows a style, which has elements from modern Western drama and ru-hozi (a form of Iranian traditional theatrical performance),” Amini stated. “Thus, its director should completely be familiar with Iranian traditional plays and Western dramatic literature,” he added. “The plays dating back to that period suffer from some shortcomings that make the work difficult to be staged. Thus, I will have to make some modifications to the play for the performance,” he noted. He said that he aims to attract the attention to Iranian plays, which have rarely been introduced over the past few decades. Amini also plans to stage the play if its reading performance is warmly received by theatergoers.