STAGE REVIEW : ‘Iranian Nights’ Thinly Veils Rushdie Cause

Some events cannot live up to the hype they generate.

That’s pretty much what happened Wednesday at the much-ballyhooed opening of “Iranian Nights”--a thinly disguised theatrical defense of Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses.” It turned out to be pretty much an evening for the already converted, the simply curious and the eager media.

This 45-minute defense of free speech by playwright Howard Brenton in collaboration with writer Tariq Ali played to a packed audience at the 397-seat Royal Court Theatre. Security was thick, television crews from various nations--including the United States, Germany and Italy--prowled the crowds. But the potentially explosive event went off without an incident. Better a whimper than a bang this time. May it be thus for the rest of the play’s limited run, ending next Friday.

The piece, which was hastily written (in five days, in a dressing room at the Royal Court, by Brenton’s own account) and almost as hastily produced, could be described as a major non-event. If support for the Rushdie cause was the goal, there were no endorsing celebrities (or other people in high places) on hand to lend the evening any additional weight. Excessive hype, and London’s wariness and weariness over the Rushdie affair may have kept them away. The better part of the audience consisted of critics, reporters of various nationalities and stripes and a handful of self-professed friends of Rushdie’s eager to be quoted--on and off camera.

As for real fireworks, they didn’t happen. The play itself is an entertaining and even witty allegory wherein a Caliph (Nabil Shaban), a poet (Paul Battacharjee as Omar Khayam) and a belly-dancing Sheherezade (Fiona Victory) play fast and loose with the “Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.”

The tale this Sheherezade has to tell to save her neck sounds remarkably familiar. It’s the story of modern Iran, where an emperor (read the late Shah Reza Pahlevi) is in the thrall of Satan (read the United States). Satan gave the emperor “all his heart desired: 3 million swords, a million crossbows and 28 Cadillacs” in exchange for an oil monopoly.

A far-off Holy Man (read the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini) saw to it that the emperor was brought down. Taking over the country in the emperor’s place (and behaving as badly or worse) he became outraged when a poet (read Rushdie) belonging to a family of true believers on a small far-off island (in the grip of Satan and “where two queens sit on one throne”) wrote a blasphemous book. When the Caliph asks Sheherezade the nature of the blasphemy, she replies: “No one knows. It was a book that nobody could read.”

You can take it from there. The piece is overt agitprop by a playwright (Brenton) not especially renowned for subtleties, and a writer and former anti-Vietnam War radical (Ali) who once marched on the U.S. Embassy in London and burned the flag.

As a humorous political tract, “Iranian Nights” is just short enough and benign enough to cause no major offense or international incident--and to slap Britain (and the United States and, for that matter, the so-called free world) on the wrist for knuckling under to the Ayatollah’s terrorist pressure. Its second half updates itself to modern times and turns more serious and chiding, concluding with a reading of the names of past writers singed at the stake of political repression, including Oscar Wilde, Bertolt Brecht, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Vaclav Havel.

Director Penny Cherns has turned out an accomplished performance of these “Nights,” modestly bedecked in a setting of pillows and curtains that--appropriately--looks like something from the cover for a box of Turkish Delight (Colin Piggott is the designer). But “Iranian Nights” has the built-in limitations common to most propaganda as theater: It is narrow in scope and unlikely to survive beyond its immediate and specific purpose. Call this one “Much Ado About Something,” though perhaps not quite enough.

Other comments in the British press included Charles Spencer’s assessment in the Daily Telegraph that “it was never on the cards that ‘Iranian Nights’ would turn out to be a work of subtle sensitivity. . . . The play has many hard things to say about militant Islam, but is also robustly entertaining with some excellent jokes.”

“The play itself offers us no esthetic bolt-holes,” wrote Irving Wardle in the Times. “Brenton describes it as a ‘pin prick for free speech.’ It’s purpose is to keep alive the sense of outrage over ‘The Satanic Verses’ affair before the normalization process sets in. It is not a well-organized play. . . .”

Said Michael Coveney in the Financial Times: “Ali/Brenton, as opposed to Ali Baba, lace fantasy with fact, argument and a vivid concern. . . . (The play’s) very compression is a virtue denying the conventional expectations of civilised dramatic development . . . the disguise of it in hasty clothing is in itself a valid theatrical ploy.”