A play titled ‘The Owner of the Keys’ - based on a book of the same title written by French writer Milan Kundera - is being staged at the Arasbaran cultural center in Tehran.
“The focus is on amateurs and to provide the enthusiastic young actors at Arasbaran theater school the opportunity to put into practice what they have learned,” Mehr news agency quoted director Nader Naderpour as saying.
“The play’s content is sophisticated but its theme is gloomy due to the focus on war and its side-effects. I devoted two of the three terms of acting courses to practical analysis to ensure a professional performance,” he said.
Considering drama and performance as the focal point, the play is rendered on the style of ‘Poor Theater,’ a kind of theater in which the pieces center on the skill of the actor rather than the theater décor, and often performed with only a handful of props, he noted.
It is the story of two families living in a house in former Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. Recently married, the daughter and her husband live with her parents. Meanwhile, the arrival of a woman, a former war combatant, who is familiar with the man, reveals that his marriage is a way to escape war due to his fears. The play will run till March 13.
Milan Kundera
Born in 1929, Kundera is the most recognized Czech-born living writer, and one of the world’s best-known authors. Living in France since 1975, he sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores. His best-known work is ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ written in 1984, which is translated to Persian in addition to ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Immortality’, respectively written in 2000 and 1990.
A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions and has been awarded several prizes such as ‘ The Austrian State Prize for European Literature’ in 1987, the international ‘Herder Prize’ in 2000, the ‘Czech State Literature Prize’ in 2007, and the ‘Ovid Prize’ in 2010.
