Akbar Radi

 A Contemporary Iranian Playwright (1939-2007)

by Reza Shirmarz

                                                                      

Akbar Radi was born in Rasht in 1939. His father was a well-educated man who could speak Turkish, French and Russian and ran a sweet shop with his brother. Akbar's mother was a sympathetic, wise housewife and a mother to many kids and adults in the neighborhood although not highly educated. Akbar was seven when he kicked off his primary school, but his father went bankrupt and the whole family moved to Tehran after a while. Akbar went to a French high school in Tehran and wrote a short story called The Dead Mouse, before he was admitted to the College of Literature in the field of Social Sciences at the University of Tehran in 1960. The story published in one of the major Iranian newspapers at that time was based upon Akbar's readings of Sadegh Hedayat, the father of modern Persian literature. Baran (The Rain) his next story won the first prize in a writing competition in a youth magazine called Etela'at. In the next two years, he wrote a long story The Clown and another story called The Tale of the Sea, which were never published. He joined a theater group called Torfeh (i.e. Unique) in 1962. 

Akbar was admitted to the graduate school in the same field but abandoned his academic career exactly before submitting his final thesis. The main reason was that he loved theater, especially playwriting. Concurrently, he finished a teaching course and officially became a teacher of literature in 1962 in Tehran. Akbar wrote The Blue Outlet and The Downfall during this period. He wrote these two plays influenced by a performance of Ibsen's A Doll's House he saw a couple of years ago. His wife mentioned later that he would not become a playwright if he had not seen that performance. His first plays appeared on the stage and the national TV in 1967 and he started officially teaching drama in the Institution of Art Tutors in 1976 in Tehran. In 1987, Akbar Radi began to teach drama at BA level as a freelance lecturer at the University of Tehran. He kept teaching drama at the graduate level even after he got retired in 1994. Furthermore, he was invited to attend the Iran-German Theater Committee and give a speech on drama and theater in 1995. Four years later, in 1999, his five decades of nonstop creative endeavors was celebrated on the National Theater Day in Iran and a national prize was set up in his name in 2000 which is still given to the outstanding playwrights in the International Festival of University Theater. Akbar Radi wrote more than 20 full-length plays and a couple of one-act plays over a period of 50 years most of which were performed and published. 

Although many believe that Akbar Radi followed the realistic tradition of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, he wrote, in my view, in different genres from realism to surrealism not only about contemporary Iran but also about Iran's history or historical characters. Radi was a man of precision and experience and never stopped stepping into the unknown or less known parts of the society or history and provide his readers and audiences with a group of literary masterpieces, although his works were censored or banned in the post-revolutionary Iran. I remember that Akbar Radi wrote and re-wrote a play so many times that his favorite characters, as he mentioned, started breathing and walking as living creatures. Like any other great playwright, Akbar Radi was going back to his earlier plays and used to reconsider and reshape various parts of his works, the general structure (stages & scenes), the characters, their dialogues, the description of each scene, etc. His constant meticulous endeavors were towards the refinement of his dramatic works, characters and situations. He re-wrote one of his historical plays 11 times until he felt the characters are well-polished and highly refined.

Akbar Radi's Plays

The Blue Aperture 

(1st, 2nd and 3rd editions in 1962,  1977 & 2006)

A play in three acts. Date: 1959. Location: Rasht. At the beginning of the first act, Homayoun enters and delivers a letter sent by Ehsan the son of Pilehagha Pirbazari (a  mean religious fishmonger) who has gone to Tehran in 1956 but is not experiencing a happy life there and wants eagerly to go abroad and study in Germany. Pilehagha who started his fish business from scratch does not accept his son's decision and shows Ziabari out. After a while Anoush, the suitor of Afshan, Pilehagha's daughter, comes in along with his family. At the outset of the second act, we see the suitor, an intellectual teacher, and his family in Pilehagha's house. Pilehagha, angry about the money he has spent on the proposal event, leaves the room throwing a tantrum. Anoush who is smart and witty follows him and pays him the expenses of the ongoing family gathering. They do not come to an agreement on the marriage proposal although Pilehagha takes the money from Anoush. In fact, Pilehagha hates the intellectual young teacher since they think differently. In the meantime, the fishmonger is sure that the teacher is the main reason why his son has left his family. 

The third act begins when Anoush and Afshan (the girl) are having a chat. Homayoun who is Anoush's old friend and has recently lost his wealthy father enters and let them know that he is going away. He makes fun of his old friends lost ideals. He firmly believes that there is no glimmer of hope in the future and their hopes are totally shattered. Anoush feels profoundly devastated after his soulmate leaves forever. Now Ehsan (Pilehagha's son) enters coming back from Tehran. He also deepens Anoush's sorrow with his melancholic frenzied thoughts and ideas. Pilehagha returns home at the end knocking at the door and a futile cycle begins again. 

Text analysis. Generational conflict is the main theme of The Blue Aperture like many other plays from the beginning of drama history, e.g. Alcestis by Euripides, until today. The characters of The Blue Aperture are in fact the representatives of a sociopolitical, religious and economic dichotomy and disparity between the old and new generations as well as the clash of their opposing ideologies and worldviews. The play demonstrates the gap between the old rotten traditions and dynamic modern movement which began to take place more seriously at the time the play was written (1962). The playwright told me once that his home city (Rasht) has always been a gate or entrance for the European movements and ideas to enter into Iran and that is why he came up with a play about the clash of new and old generations, the youth who tend to familiarize themselves with the new global thoughts and the old ones who tended to stick to their ludicrous lifestyle.

The Downfall

(1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th editions in 1964, 1976, 2006, 2018)

A play in five acts. Date: 1960. Location: A village in Gilan called Narestan. In the first act we see Farrokh who has broken off his relationship with his fiancé, the daughter of his wealthy uncle before he has left them asks Jahangir, Mersedeh's husband and a son-in-law of a rich land owner called Emad, to stay with his family for a while. Jahangir accepts his request reluctantly. Farrokh and Jahangir are both against the government. Jahangir does some anti-governmental activities in the rural areas and now is trying to build a school for village children with the financial assistance of his father-in-law. The second act begins with the marriage anniversary party of Jahangir and Mersedeh. Mersedeh's father, Emad, who has personal grudge against Jahangir, makes his best attempt to play the role of a troublemaker and create tension throughout the party. In the middle of the party, Farrokh's uncle, Kasmayi, comes along to take him back home. At this point the audience get to know that Kasmayi is an influential land owner who has committed murder in order to hinder or stop Jahangir's activities. That is why Farrokh has abandoned him and his daughter.

In the third act, Farangis, Mersedeh's sister, who has come to spend her holidays in her father's house in Narestan rebukes Mersedeh for her lifestyle and coping with her husband's behaviors and mannerisms. She firmly believes that Jahangir strives to earn credit and reputation at any price. In the meantime, Emad makes his best attempts to force his son-in-law to stop his current activities which is a waste of money and could endanger their lives. In the fourth act, Kasmayi threatens and then bribes Jahangir in order to leave the village, but is challenged by Jahangir's father-in-law who finds his bribery totally insulting. Eventually, Kasmayi wins the challenge since Emad signs official papers and gives him his lands and properties. Kasmayi makes peace as the winner, but there are rumors that the villagers have started fighting against each other due to their current financial issues. Emad leaves the village for Rasht and leaves Jahangir and his unfulfilled ideals behind. In the end, Mersedeh tries hopefully to comfort her husband. She believes that this is a good chance for them to rebuild their marriage and forge a closer bond in a house which does not belong to them anymore. 

Text analysis. The Downfall is a political arena in which class conflict and intellectual crisis during Iran's 1960s land reforms is painstakingly depicted  by the playwright. Many villagers migrated to big cities because the agriculture industry and the lives of farmers were harmed by the land reforms. The government claimed that their primary goal was to give farmers full independence but the result was more of sociopolitical inequality in reality. A minority of investors and influential land owners retook the villagers under their control. Akbar Radi acts as a social realist playwright as well as a dramatic historian in The Downfall. Jahangir is a member of the elite and digs wells, builds schools and gives the illiterate villagers speeches about the status quo and how the government is going to ruin their lives through mismanagement, misinformation. Overall, The Downfall reveals the social inception of intellectual movements in Iran towards the extermination of feudalism, generational gap, how easily influenced are uneducated farmers being ruled by a minority of land owners, and finally, the defeat of the elite. The desperate defeat of Jahangir could possibly be compared to the situation through which Dr. Thomas Stockmann went in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.

Behind the Windows

(1st, 2nd & 3rd in 1967, 1976, 2016)

A one-act play. Date: mid-20th century. Location: Tehran. A young couple, Maryam and Bamdad, have moved to a new flat, the current one, a couple of years ago. Maryam is an elegant, extrovert and happy teacher. Bamdad (in Farsi means "morning") is an unhappy introvert writer and from the outset to the end of the play we see him sitting behind his desk constantly reading and writing. He has been currently writing something new. He is not that outgoing or social. His wife is quite absorbed by his creative job and tries to discover his ideas even before he puts them on paper, but he does not like to expose his unfinished work at all. He asks her to wait until the new piece of writing is ready. In general, the first episode demonstrates a boring but psychologically healthy family environment. The young couple are content with what they have and their common life. 

There is another couple who come to see the young couple now and then. The husband works as an employee of the government but he is involved in poultry business as well. His wife is the principal of the school where Maryam works as a teacher. The couple have nothing to do but increasing their wealth and showing off nonstop about their  financial status and social advancements. At some point, they wear masks of flies and perform a weird absurd ritual. Years passes and the young couple become older, time-worn and bored while the other couple become more well-off and ostentatious. After thirty years, we see that Maryam has got retired and their rotten flat is full of mice which are chewing things away. Finally, Bamdad who has turned grey says that he has finished his book and is ready to read it to Maryam. He sits behind his desk and starts reading it. He reads the opening dialogues of Behind the Windows at the end of the play before darkness falls.

Text analysis: Directed by Roknoddin Khosravi in 1969, Behind the windows is one of the most refined and modern plays of Akbar Radi. The play was written exactly when Iran was becoming more industrial in 1960s and it depicts two families and four different characters reacting in various ways to the ongoing situation. Two types of women are presented by the playwright: Maryam as a young hardworking teacher and her guest as a modern, but pretentious profit-seeking woman. Of course, it is obvious that the characters are not defined as black or white, they are grey and more Beckettian in a sense. The play shows a futile absurd cycle through which nothing special happens, even though a creative mind is registering every moment of it with integrity and acuteness. Again, we can see that the playwright reveals another aspect of historical dichotomy existing in the fabric of a Iranian society which is getting westernized in a hectic pace and receiving capitalism as a new lifestyle. The real time has changed into dramatic time containing the whole span of life of the four aforementioned characters. We observe their entire life in slightly more than an hour, which has been quite innovative and modern at that time in Iran.

Death in Autumn 

(1967)

Death in Autumn consists of three one-act plays, i.e. Declination, Travelers, and Death in Autumn. Location: Gilan. In the first one-act play Declination, we see that Moluk has left her husband due to his violence and discourtesy and has come to reside in her father's house but nobody welcomes her and shows any sort of sympathy or hospitality. Instead everybody blames her for the long-running bust-up of her marriage. Concurrently, the members of her family keep chit-chatting all the time about their clumsy sluggish son who has gone to Rudbar in order to skip the compulsory military service. In the second episode Travelers, Muluk's husband is gambling with a bunch of other gamblers when her father, Mashdi, barges in and lets everybody know about his dead horse, the one he had recently bought. He gets into a heated argument with the seller of the horse and, eventually, leaves them to look for his son and goes to Rudbar without paying any attention to others' warnings about the bad weather conditions. In the third part of Death in Autumn, Mashdi is sick and is going to die soon. Muluk's mother who used to reprimand her daughter for her problematic family life now has changed her attitude and rebukes his son-in-law for what has happened to her husband, Mashdi. Muluk's husband remains silent for a while but finally defends himself and gives the reasons behind the ongoing tragedy from his personal viewpoint. At the end of the play, Mashdi passes away hallucinating about his son.

Text Analysis: Radi's Moluk in Death in Autumn and Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House have common characteristics. Both are suppressed and the in a male-dominant society. Their identity as women is profoundly denied by their family members and friends while both of them strive to gain independence and move towards some sort of self-knowledge. In fact, Radi and Ibsen both have reacted to patriarchal societies where women's rights are not considered as serious issues and they are more of resourceful mothers and sexual objects in extreme cases. Moluk and Nora are the representations of women who endeavor to redefine their beings as women through taking social roles and seeking freedom of choice and action. As Maurice Valency in his The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen once mentioned, "Nora is a carefully studied example of what we have come to know as the hysterical personality-bright, unstable, impulsive, romantic, quite immune from feelings of guilt, and, at bottom, not especially feminine" (Templeton, 1989, p. 29). Radi's Moluk is also a rebellious female who accepts the repercussions of her aberrations, according to the environment she lives in, and takes bold actions towards her social freedom.

Reference

Templeton, J. (Jan., 1989). The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen. PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 1 , pp. 28-40.

Iranian Heritage 

(1970)

Shokooh (on the left) in Iranian Heritage directed
by Mahmud Mohammad Yusof in 1980, Tehran

This is a play in four acts. Location: Tehran. Date: 1951. In the first act, Aqa Bala, a tenant of Musa (the landlord and a Mullah), reveals his decision which is apparently made under the influence of his wife to leave the rented house. Musa owes Aqa Bala a significant amount of money and needs to pay off his debt before his tenant leaves. He feels stressed out and sees if he can come up with an alternative solution. In the aftermath, there is an argument going on between Musa and his student son, Jalil, which sheds light on the fact that the father has a second wife and Jalil is the only one who knows it. In the second act, Musa deceitfully persuades Azim, his elder son and the breadwinner of the family, to marry Aga Bala's daughter as an alternative solution he seeks in order to skip or postpone the payment of his huge debt. The point is that Musa not only does not believe in the girl at all but he sees her as an ill-reputed girl who has brought great shame, humiliation and dishonor on them since she does not have hijab, meaning that she does not wear any sort of Islamic veil covering her head and neck. Azim suggests to sell his dead brother's house in Elahieh, but Musa refuses deliberately to do it because he believes that his son has passed away recently and selling the house is going to harm his fatherly feelings. In the third act, Azim sends his mother to ask for Aqa Bala's daughter's hand. There is again an argument between Musa and his student son while there are rumors that someone has plighted Shokooh's troth (Musa's daughter) and is going to marry her but she does not like him at all since she has got a nice singing voice, seeks to become a singer in the future and such a marriage might unavoidably ruin her career prospects. In the fourth act, it turns out that Aqa Bala's daughter has been engaged with a captain, which upsets Azim a lot. Totally broken, he brings up the topic of the house he tends to sell, i.e. his dead brother's house in Elahieh, but finally, he finds out that Musa's second wife resides there. Aqa Bala's wife strives to calm Azim down and soothe his pains and wounds and eventually Musa sees her seducing Azim secretively. After a while, we see that everything is as it was before, except Jalil who has dropped out of his school and has kicked off his military service and Aqa Bala's wife who is content enough to stay in Musa's house.

Aqa Baba's wife (Azita Lachini)
seducing Azim (Daryoosh Irannejad)

Text Analysis: Iranian Heritage unveils the complicated multidimensional form of connection between money, religion and culture, as Akbar Radi told me in one of our meetings, in a simply-structured text which represents the fears and hopes of profit-seekers, men of God and the elite part of Iranian society in 1940s and 1950s when the Iranian playwrights and directors sought to create an Iranian type of drama and theater. Structurally speaking, it is paramount to mention that Jalil's presence, as the representative of the elite, at the beginning of the play giving us a short description of the story background as well as the set design was an attempt to avoid long written "stage description" as a tradition in the realist and naturalist playwriting. Although this has been frequently seen in the western drama since the ancient Greek tragedians and comedy-writers, Radi is the first Iranian playwright who eliminates the stage description from the outset of the play and converts it into dialogue in order to forge a direct relationship with the spectators. It is also important to know that Radi has a negative interpretation of Iranian intellectuals and illustrates his pessimistic beliefs towards the Iranian elite through Jalil's lazy, shaggy, bitter, irresponsible, and extravagant character. In a way, Radi gives a dark image of the ongoing ideology led by Iranian elite at that time and considers Iranian intellectuals as sluggishly ineffective and bitterly impractical. On the other hand, Musa as a representative of lucrative godliness uses sharia to exploit people while he himself pursues a parasitic life under the financial support of Azim who has spend his life diligently working and selflessly protecting his siblings and parents. Azim is a reminder of a character called Bamdad in Behind the Windows. In fact, Azim as an effective and practical person presents a different worldview comparing to his younger hedonist brother. In the meantime, Shokooh represents the revolting Iranian women who seek to establish their social rights and freedom and profoundly refuse to approve and accept the traditional way of living, i.e. staying at home as housewives, getting married and bringing up their children and nothing more. Shokooh shapes the feminist aspect of Iranian Heritage and while Aqa Baba's wife is the indicative of Iranian traditional woman.

Reference

Tehrani, M. D. & Zahedi, F. (2017), The Examination of the Role of the Elite in Iranian Society in Behind the Windows, Iranian Heritage and The Fishermen. Sociological Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 629-650.

The Fishermen 

(1973)

A play in ten scenes. Location: a port in the northern part of Iran. Date: 1940s. At the beginning of the play, Boyook comes to buy fish from a fishmonger called Geda-Ali Sammak, but he cannot afford it and steals some fish at Yaqoob's suggestion. In the next scene, Boyook enters into where the fishermen have got together chit-chatting about their glorious past and their achievements. They all know that Boyook has stolen the fish for his pregnant wife. Yaqoob insists to turn Boyook in while Ayyoob and Shoja tend to support him. Ayyoob says: "We'd have stood up for him if we were good men." But, overall, if they do not turn him in, one of them needs to pay for the theft. At the end of the day, one of the fishermen gives him in and he pays for his minor crime being immediately fired. At this moment, Ramyar, the head of a fishing company, comes in and informs them all that he is going to found a sports club and pushes his fishermen who spend their leisure time in a bar and spend their income there to go to the gym under the supervision of Ayyoob. Persuaded by Ayyoob who is one of the fishermen, they forget about their everyday drinking binge and attend the gym to do some workout on a regular basis. Now the intensive daily workout arouses the opposition of another fisherman called Yaqoob who believes that Ramyar has coerced them to build their muscles to become better workers for the company and maximize the profit the director of the company makes. He speaks out his mind and lets everybody know that this is only for the benefit of the fishing company, not for their health. After a while, Ramyar kicks off a cooperative, and grants membership to his fishermen and appoints again Ayyoob as his trusted manager. Yaqoob opposes the cooperative organization and tries to raise his colleagues' awareness about how they have been enslaved and exploited by the director, Ramyar. Finally, the fishermen revolt and force Ramyar to resign. Ayyoob also gives in his notice when he finds the job too risky. In the final scene, we see a ghost which looks like Yaqoob unveils the statue of Ramyar while Ayyoob appears in the stage depth. 

Text Analysis: The Fishermen symbolizes the populist Pahlavi dynasty who persuaded the bourgeois class to establish labor unions. They wanted to pretend that they support such unions at large whereas the persuasion of the bourgeois faced the severe protests of the petite as well as the traditional bourgeoisie. Concurrently, the working class showed a strong tendency to neutralize the unions and cooperatives. In various parts of the play, the fishermen refer to their better days without the establishment of unions and cooperatives despite the hardship they had experienced. It could be said that The Fishermen demonstrates the fact that the systems designed by populist governments exploit their members and use their members to expand the scope of their businesses and make more profit. This antiheroic play depicts the dichotomy between the negative and positive forces from the inception to the completion of such unions and organizations. It is the arena in which two strong ideologies struggle to survive victimizing the less well-off part of the society, i.e. the working people. The Fishermen shows us that in a capitalistic system a fisherman is deprived of a fish while the fishing company throws away the extra fish after making the planned amount of profit.

The Glorious Smile of Mr. Geel 

(1974)

Tooti in The Glorious Smile of Mr. Geel 
directed by Hadi Marzban
in National Theater (2009)

A full-length play in three parts: Scorpio, A Harp in the Wind & Heritage. In the first part titled Scorpio, Alinaqiqan Geel, a former landowner, owns several factories. He is sick and his daughter, Faqr-e-Iran along with her husband have come apparently to help but in fact lay their hands on his wealth. All the family members live in Mr. Geel's house and look up to him because they need him and his money to live on, except his married daughter. Mr. Geel's wife suffers from some sort of mental disorder and their elder daughter, Forouqozzaman, acts like her mother's successor having everything under control. It is obvious that the members of Mr. Geel's family do not have a good relationship and seize every opportunity to use others' weaknesses for their own benefit. In the second part of the play, A Harp in the Wind, Davood, one of the sons of Mr. Geel, who nothing to do but gamble and hunt, persuades his father to ignore the upcoming surgery and treatment and find his cure in their gorgeous young maiden's body called Tooti. Davood convinces him that a new baby for the family can be his ultimate cure and Mr. Geel is intrigued easily to do so. Mr. Geel talks about his decision with his daughter, Forouqozzaman, and she promises to assist in this matter. In the final part called Heritage, Mr. Geel is in the hospital due to his severe cancer and Forouqozzaman uses her absolute unrivalled power to take everything under control. It turns out that Mr. Geel has inherited his house to Forouqozzaman and she kicks out his highly-educated free-living brother, Jamshid, on the spot. She lets him know that their father has given him nothing but a school he had ordered to be built in his name by the villagers. Jamshid leaves the house after listening to the humiliating words of his sister and Davood deflowers Tooti aggressively with an opium pipe before he shots himself in the courtyard.

Hamlet with Season's Salad 

(1974)

Text Analysis: 

Other plays of Akbar Radi

Sing in the Mist (1975), The Savior in a Foggy Morning (1985), The Stairs (1989), Gentle with the Red Rose (1989), Amiz Ghalamdoon (1998), Night on the Wet Pavement (1999), Our Luminous Garden (1999), The Tango of the Hot Egg (2002), 
The Melody of a Rainy City (2003), Khanomcheh and Mahtabi (2003), Good Night, Mr Count (2004), Cactus (2004), Down the Saqqakhaneh Passage (2005), The Chocolate Songs (2006).