Things did not begin well. My sometimes
violent experiences in Edinburgh this summer have rather lowered my
tolerance of percussive metal-bashing as a theatrical device, so my
heart hardened on finding Javad Namaki and Hamidreza Naeimi Jegarlouei
hard (or at least noisily) at work with steel hammers on a trio of
steel-framed structures as the audience entered. To my relief, things
let up after a few minutes (but not few enough) as the play proper
began.
Homayun Ghanizadeh and his Tehran-based Mungu Theatre Company kick off
an Iranian mini-season of theatre, cinema and discussion at the
Barbican with this Beckett-meets-Heath-Robinson vision of the Greek
inventor and his son, working to escape their imprisonment by King
Minos in the labyrinth Daedalus himself had designed. (There’s an
agreeably silly running joke with Icarus voicing the echo on the word
“labyrinth... -rinth... -rinth”.) The performance style is that of
gentle clowning as the pair, clad in aviators’ helmets, goggles and
stripey knee-socks, march or lollop across the stage between their
various assemblies; however, the relationship has elements of
master/servant, sergeant/private and even
Endgame’s Hamm/Clov as well as
simple father/son: the older man insists that things always be done
properly, i.e. according to his programme, with no time for his son’s
imaginative life. (Another running gag keeps dividing the world into
three kinds of people: those who do A, those who do B and those who
blow whistles – no prizes for guessing how Daedalus orders Icarus
around.)
So far, so undistinguished. The hour-long show takes off more or less
when the characters do: they slot their frames together to make a crazy
contraption of steel and industrial fans, balanced on a central pole,
which a quartet of black-clad stagehands manoeuvre around the stage and
make its pilots execute crazy pitches and even 360-degree rolls. The
exhilaration of flight combines with some edgy self-satire as they
consider crashing the machine into Minos’ palace and thus becoming the
first airborne suicide bombers in history. In the end, Daedalus jumps
to safety on a feathered parachute from the vehicle he had not designed
to land, and Icarus remains in the sky, the boundless space of
imagination which is his natural element. If Ghanizadeh went further
and deeper, the content would match the impact of his crazy directorial
and design vision.
Written for the Financial
Times.