The Burning of Cinema Rex in Abadan at the Edinburgh Festival

This year, the Edinburgh Festival is hosting a performance in the Fringe section called 'Cinema,' which addresses the incident of the burning of Cinema Rex in August 1978, considered one of the largest terrorist events in the world, yet rarely discussed. This is true both inside Iran—where the Islamic Republic quickly closed the case by attributing it to the SAVAK—and outside Iran, where few know that this event, with 422 fatalities (ranking third among the deadliest terrorist incidents globally after September 11 and a bombing in Iraq in 2007), occurred. The very act of addressing this topic in a theater is an interesting idea that Nazli Tabatabai has made the main focus of this performance. This Iranian theater director residing in Britain, who manages the artistic direction of the 'Zendeh' theater group, has previously participated in the Edinburgh Festival, and now her latest work has twenty performances in Edinburgh. Nazli Tabatabai is also the sole performer in this one-woman show, written by Stone Gaitorp: she plays a cat named Shahrzad. This cat lived happily in Cinema Rex during the prosperous days of Abadan—a city known as the Paris of Iran, distinctly different from other cities—and now speaks to the audience about the cinema's regular customers and her friends—those who perished in the fire—and recounts their stories to us. The cat essentially transforms into Shahrzad the storyteller; a Shahrzad whose tale we hear from the cat's perspective, now sharing a bitter event with us in heartbreaking detail. She repeatedly mentions that she does not know whether she is 'a cat that thinks it is human or a human that thinks it is a cat.' On the border between cat/human, we encounter an emotional being that is very active on stage and tries to utilize various corners of the stage to prevent the one-person format from tiring the audience. The scene is summarized by a few empty chairs and a half-burnt curtain. The performance aims to recreate a shocking scene through its monologues, where the ashes of the victims still lie on the ground. The idea of empty chairs emphasizes the absence of the lost ones while blending the scene with the performance hall, meaning that Shahrzad points out the names of victims she knows—Zahra, Mohammad, etc.—on each empty chair, and her references gradually reach the hall where the audience is seated. The sense of the burnt cinema and the audience members who lost their lives could enhance the empathy of an audience member sitting in a hall; thus, Shahrzad's references to the audience serve not only a stage function but also a conceptual one, sometimes engaging the audience from this angle in the unimaginable event that, in fact, occurred on a hot summer day in the beautiful city of Abadan, now buried under the ashes of politics and political games. However, the problem with the performance arises from its reliance on a purely emotional—and explanatory—narrative of the incident. In fact, the text lacks the depth to explore the motivations and inner feelings of people and can only serve as an information-laden text. Of course, the creators of the work must add many explanations for an audience unfamiliar with this event—which may seem superfluous to an Iranian audience: such as all the explanations about the revolution's occurrence and later the war, the oil issue, and Abadan's situation before the revolution—but shaping this information could have been done more artistically, avoiding direct and sometimes slogan-like references (like the phrase 'Abadan's oil keeps Europe's lights on'). Nonetheless, some explanations seem unavoidable and sometimes align with the mood of the work; including the explanation about the deer, the film that the victims were watching. Shahrzad mentions that the Shah did not like this film because it presented a bad image of Iran, and the clergy were fundamentally opposed to cinema. There are also traces of humor in the text that the playwright prefers not to emphasize too much, focusing solely on the emotional aspect of this bitter event—including Shahrzad's crying for Meenu, one of the victims. However, perhaps emphasizing this humor could have been a significant asset for this performance and prevented it from becoming overly emotional; humor that, for instance, when referring to the clergy's opposition to cinema, Shahrzad—a cat—says that someone read the entire Quran to her, but found nothing about the evil of cinema in it.