Danish Play Marx & Coca Cola at Paliz Theater

‘Marx and Coca Cola,’ a play by Danish author Nils Schou, 74, will be staged at Tehran’s Paliz Theater by Iranian playwright and theater director Kianoush Akhbari.

The play is slated for January 16-February 13, every day at 5:30, Azad News Agency reported. It has two characters played by theater actor and director Bahram Tashakor and actress Nasrin Derakhshan.

Jolly Cola, an original Danish soft drink dating back to 1959, had a significant contribution to the creation of the play.

In the 1970’s, Jolly Cola was still a dominant brand in Denmark. It’s advertising campaigns featured groups of teenagers relaxing and having fun together in the Danish summer, rowing canoes, splashing together in the sea or strolling down a country road, according to the book ‘Imagining Marketing: Art, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde’ edited by Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson.

But the image of Jolly Cola, along with those of Coca Cola and Pepsi suffered from the Marxist current in the Danish youth culture of the time. Schou looks at this period in retrospective and suggests how ideologically loaded the soft drink was at the time.

The protagonist of ‘Marx and Coca Cola’ is a hypocritical young revolutionary, betrayed by his preference for the brown fluid which is an antithesis to ‘correct values.’ Eventually he turns out to be a bourgeois in disguise.

The play was performed at the Royal Danish Theater in 1981 and was published in 1982.

In his writing, Schou tackles issues such as generational and societal changes, relationships and gender roles.

Paliz Theater is located at No. 69, Sepand Street, South Azodi Street, Karim Khan Blvd.