TEHRAN – An adaptation of French novelist and playwright Jean Genet’s 1948 play “Splendid's” is on stage at Tehran’s Da Theater.

Soheil Mahzun is the director of the play, which is translated into Persian by Shiva Hazrati. 

Amir Tayyebi, Hooman Karimi, Reza Haseli, Milad Hushangi and Parnia Sanai Movahhed are the main members of the cast for the play, which will remain on stage until August 25.

"Splendid's" is a two-act police thriller, which was never staged in Jean Genet's lifetime. In 1952 he announced that he had destroyed the manuscript, and the play was assumed lost. Only in 1993 did a surviving copy reappear.

Exhausted, unshaven and wearing evening dress, Genet's gangsters never let go of their machine-guns - not even when they dance together. Their conversations contain some of Genet's finest dialogue; an insane mixture of melodramatic speech-making and low-camp bickering, all wrapped up in an alluring pastiche of forties American film noir, lurching stylishly from tough realism into wicked black humor.

Born in 1910 in France, Jean Genet was a playwright, poet, novelist, and criminal. During his youth, he found himself in jail multiple times. However, it was while he was imprisoned that Genet wrote his very first novel, “Our Lady of the Flowers” in 1944.

After being released from prison, Genet sought out the avant-garde writer, Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by Genet’s work, and even petitioned the French president, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, to exonerate Genet, after being faced with a life sentence. 

Genet became associated with the Theatre of Cruelty, which his most famous pieces became associated with, for example, “The Maids” (1949), “Deathwatch” (1949), “The Balcony” (1956), and “The Blacks” (1958).

Other celebrated works of Genet include the novel, “A Thief’s Journal” (1949), about his experiences in prison, and “The Screens” (1963), a biting political play about the Algerian War of Independence. Genet died of throat cancer in 1986.

ABU/