Feedback on The Play The Shadows

The Tragic as a Contemporary Experience "Afsaneh Mahian and The Shadows"

Iranian director Afsaneh Mahian is among the creators who approach ancient Greek tragedy not as a
cultural relic to be reproduced, but as a living way of understanding human experience. Starting from
documentary theater, the collection of oral testimonies, and poetic stage writing, her work explores the
relationship between personal memory and collective history.
In The Shadows, a performance based on real narratives and research material, tragedy is neither an
object of adaptation nor a pretext for a contemporary translation of ancient myths. It functions as an
interpretive framework through which the experiences of loss, exile, violence, and moral responsibility
acquire a universal dimension. Mahian’s interest is not directed towards the revival of the ancient world,
but towards the search for those human situations that continue to make tragic thought necessary.
For decades, tragic poets have constantly returned to the stage, sometimes through new readings of
classical works and sometimes as a starting point for original creations that converse with the political and
social crises of their time. Often, however, these performances are trapped in the need to prove that
tragedy remains relevant. The question is perhaps misleading from the start.
The value of tragedy does not depend on its actualization, but on its ability to illuminate experiences that
constantly recur with different historical faces. It does not need to become contemporary. Contemporary
must be the way in which we approach it.
Starting from this point we can also read The Shadows. The performance does not seek the forms of
Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides within today’s reality, nor does it attempt to recognize contemporary
Antigones or Medeas.
On the contrary, it treats the tragic as a constant of human existence, which manifests itself every time a
person is confronted with forces greater than their will: war, displacement, loss, the violence of historical
developments, but also the dilemmas of personal responsibility.
Thus, the ancient myth does not function as a narrative model, but as a way to organize experience and
acquire semantic coherence. Based on real testimonies and extensive research, The Shadows uses the
myth not as a narrative standard but as an interpretive tool.
Mahian does not seek to tell just another story about war or becoming a refugee. She is interested in
highlighting the way in which individual narratives are transformed into collective memory, through which
the theatrical act can restore the relationship between personal experience and public history.
This choice acquires special significance because it comes from a creator working in Tehran. Her
relationship with Greek tragedy is not one of cultural origin, nor of obligation towards a Western theatrical
canon.

My (this year's) favorites at Peiraios 260 The Shadows

The actors and the director of the play did not know if they would manage to reach Europe safely to
present their work. Much less so, when their rehearsals were taking place in war shelters, threatening their
integrity at any moment.
And yet, the director and writer Afsaneh Mahian with the very young actresses – the flower of their country
– Nastaran Davari, Shakiba Hosseini and Shaghayegh Mohajer highlighted a theater of self-sacrifice, a
theater of, according to Asclepius, therapeutic dimension.
The three of them became, in a heartbreaking way, arks of an ancient knowledge that in their bodies and
voices took on another dimension: excerpts from the stories of Antigone, Jocasta, Medea were nothing but
moments of the human adventure where they are repeated anonymously and just as tragically, especially
in homelands that know only violence and injustice.
One of the performances-political events of this year’s Festival at Peiraios 260.

Speaking Out as Resistance Afsaneh Mahian's The Shadows

At the end of the first of two performances at the Athens Epidaurus Festival, there is no usual Q&A;, but
rather a brief speech. The spokesperson for the Iranian theater company steps up to the microphone and
explains the extraordinary context of the production and its guest performance. She sets out how
extremely difficult it was to bring this performance—which is not allowed to be shown in Iran—to fruition,
and the level of commitment required from the Festival to bring the company to Athens. Her emotional
address intensifies the dismay that one could already feel while watching the play The Shadows. And this
happens precisely at a time when military hostilities between the USA and Iran have resumed.
Afsaneh Mahian’s play processes the experiences of Iranian women. It addresses their oppression,
speaks of flight and the readiness to die; it is about people the regime makes disappear, and about a
young woman searching for the body of her brother in order to give him a dignified burial. The Shadows is
a choral speaking of three young women that negotiates, voices, and makes public the unimaginably
harsh daily life of women.
The political dimension of the chorus in ancient theater can be experienced here in a new and oppressive
way. The physical actions of the three women on stage are limited. Three panels in the background,
markings on the floor, and their seemingly traditional clothing point to the cultural context. The set design,
created by Manouchehr Shoja, situates the choral speaking and restricts the actors’ scope of action and
play. It is the collective speaking out that becomes an escape, an act of resistance.
Afsaneh Mahian’s The Shadows is a powerful, enlightening, and poetic work. It opens up a vast space for
thought. The young women on stage appear both as actresses and citizens. This is profoundly political
theater. And it shows that we, the audience in Europe, need to engage much more deeply with Iran. The
audience follows the events with rapt attention and responds at the end with prolonged applause.