TEHRAN-The play “Ashes to Ashes” written by English playwright Harold Pinter and directed by Hengameh Yadegari is on stage at Arghavan Theater in Tehran.

In this extended one-act, two-hander play, which is a dialogue between a married couple, Yadegari also acts along with Soheil Pourjafar.

Written in 1996, “ Ashes to Ashes” is a triumph of power and concision. In the living room of a pleasant house in a university town outside of London, Devlin, threatened by his wife Rebecca's recollections of an abusive ex-lover, questions her relentlessly in his need for a single truth. In her seamless blending of what she knows of violence with the wider violence of the world, Rebecca reveals an eerie communion with the dead victims of unnamed political barbarities.

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, he was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include “The Birthday Party” (1957), “The Homecoming” (1964) and “Betrayal” (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include “The Servant” (1963), “The Go-Between” (1971), “The French Lieutenant's Woman” (1981), “The Trial” (1993) and “Sleuth” (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Many of Pinter's earlier plays present a profound sense of the anxiety of the outsider and focus on persecution and torture—psychological, emotional, physical—as nightmarish conditions that require no logical source. After two decades of explicitly and implicitly denying the existence of any political themes in his work, Pinter began incorporating specific political speech and addressing the conditions of torture and persecution against groups of people in a series of short one-act plays in the 1980s.

His dramas often involve strong conflicts among ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past. Stylistically, these works are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony and menace. Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and vicissitudes of memory.

Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes and other honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Légion d'honneur in 2007.

“Ashes to Ashes” will run through January 18 at the Arghavan Theater located at Ziba Dead-end, Neauphle-le-Château St., Hafez Ave.

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