Troupe From Iran to Perform Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in Yerevan

TEHRAN.(Iranart) – Iranian director Alireza Daryabeigi will stage French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi at the Yerevan State Institute of Theater and Cinematography in Armenia.

“I previously staged the play at Tehran’s Hafez Hall last December. Now my troupe is scheduled to perform the play in Yerevan on July 26 and 27 at the invitation of the acting rector of the institute, Lilit Arzumanyan,” Daryabeigi told the Persian service of MNA on Monday. 

Ubu Roi, which means Ubu the King, is about Ubu who leads a revolution and kills the king of Poland and most of the royal family. The play is a parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with bits of Hamlet and King Lear tossed in.

Shahrad Qadiri, Sara Moqadam, Shima Bakhtiari, Arameh Soltanieh and Amir-Hossein Rezai are the main members of the cast for the play. 

Daryabeigi also said that he plans to stage Chamber Music by American absurdist playwright Arthur Kopit in Tehran in January 2020.

Written in 1962, the one-act play is set in 1938 and concerns eight famous women from different historical periods who all are interned in the same insane asylum.

The women believe they are author Gertrude Stein, martyr Joan of Arc, activist Susan B. Anthony, politician Queen Isabella I of Spain, pilot Amelia Earhart, silent-film actress Pearl White, explorer Osa Johnson and Constanze Mozart, wife of the famous composer.

They have come together to represent the women of the asylum in planning for an attack they believe is soon to come from the men’s ward.

Source: Tehran Times