British performance cancelled at Iranian festival

TEHRAN,Feb.1(MNA) -- The secretary of Iran’s Fair International Theater Festival announced on Tuesday that a scheduled performance by a British troupe at the event has been cancelled. Rahmat Amini gave no details about the reason behind the cancellation. However, it seems that the theater performance has been cancelled due to the hostile political climate dominating relations between Iran and Britain. British director and mime artist Andrew Dawson was to stage “Absence and Presence”, an eloquent and often wry meditation on his father’s death, during the ongoing Fajr theater festival in Tehran. “The troupe was one of the last groups invited to the festival. Thus, we were not sure until yesterday that the group could not travel to Iran,” Amini told . “Listing the performance in the festival’s entries was made after the troupe applied for participating in the fest, but we referred the group to the organization issuing the visa,” he added. “We did not persist much in pursuing participation of the troupe in the festival, because we had to follow the policies of the system regarding cultural relations,” he stated. The organizers of the festival have replaced the British theater play with a performance from China. “The Chinese group has accepted our invitation and the arrangements are currently being made for the members of the troupe to get a visa for Iran,” Amini said. The organizers also announced on Sunday that French thespian Jacques Lassalle had cancelled his workshops, which were to be held on the sidelines of the event, due to his respiratory illness. The festival runs until February 11.