TEHRAN – Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh comes to life in the Iranian play “Butterfly and Yoke” on stage at the Sayeh Hall of Tehran’s City Theater Complex.

Celebrated dramatist Mohammad Charmshir has written the play based on letters Van Gogh wrote to his younger brother Theo.

Amirmohammad Shahani Dashtegoli is the director of the play starring Amirhossein Sardarian, Yashar Beikzadeh, Mahtab Vejdani, Maryam Kia, Alborz Ahmadkhani, Darya Razavizadeh and Ghazal Hassanzadeh.

The play focuses on the pain and suffering of the artist who failed to enjoy the benefits of his art in his lifetime but posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. 

He drew inspiration from night cafés, sunflowers and France’s beautiful scenery.

In his early life, Van Gogh used to sell his paintings, but during the last decade of his life, discovered painting as an art and began producing paintings for their artistic nature.

Yet of the more than 800 oil paintings and 700 drawings that constitute his life’s work, he sold only one in his lifetime. 

Always desperately poor, he was sustained by his faith in the urgency of what he had to communicate and by the generosity of Theo, who believed in him implicitly. 

The letters that he wrote to Theo from 1872 onward, and to other friends, give such a vivid account of his aims and beliefs, his hopes and disappointments, and his fluctuating physical and mental state that they form a unique and touching biographical record that is also a great human document.

The dramatic elements of his life – poverty, self-mutilation, mental breakdown and suicide – feed the drama of this mythology.

This mythical van Gogh has become almost inseparable from his art, inspiring artists to dramatize his saga in poems, novels, films, operas, dance ensembles, orchestral compositions and a popular song.    

“Butterfly and Yoke” has previously been staged by director Javad Mohammadpur at Tehran’s Hafez Hall in 2019. 

Mohammadpur said that Charmshir wrote the play based on Van Gogh’s book, “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”, which comprises a collection of 903 surviving letters written or received by Van Gogh. More than 650 of these were from Vincent to his brother Theo.

“Charmshir conducted his comprehensive research on other sources about the artistic genius to write the play,” he added.

Photo: Thespians perform “Butterfly and Yoke” at the Sayeh Hall of Tehran’s City Theater Complex on May 26, 2023. (Theater.ir/Reza Moattarian)

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