Blood and roses

August 23, 2000
Issue 

Picture

Blood and roses

A Beautiful Life
By Matrix Theatre
At Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane
August 22-27

REVIEW BY BRENDAN DOYLE

Every so often there is a theatrical performance that is not only exciting and totally absorbing, but also intricately connected to the messy, real world.

A Beautiful Life, written and directed by Michael Futcher and Helen Howard, is such an experience, a theatrical account of a real-life drama involving Iranian refugees in Australia. What could be more timely, with the current ongoing debate about the human rights of refugees here?

I was privileged to be at the recent Sydney performance, after a tour that also took in Melbourne, Hobart, Wagga and Griffith. Brisbane Powerhouse is the last stop on the tour.

A Beautiful Life is based on a true story. An Iranian musician working with Matrix Theatre asked them to create a play about his parents' extraordinary lives. The result is an interweaving of Hamid and his wife Jhila's experiences in Tehran, as opponents of the ayatollahs' regime, and their involvement in the 1992 raid on the Iranian embassy in Canberra. You may remember the media's labelling of that protest as "terrorism".

What the company tried to do as they created the show was to find strong theatrical images to tell the family's story. The result is a bold, rapid, heightened style of performance in which vivid moments, such as torture in a crowded Tehran prison, or hours of enforced prayer, are expressed with all their emotionally charged content, rather than simply recorded reality.

The story is told mainly through the eyes of Hamid's son Amir, who in real life was determined that his parents' story should be told. The action begins in their home in Tehran, when they were asked to shelter a friend who had joined the mujahideen. This brings on a police raid, imprisonment and torture for Hamid.

The action jumps to Canberra in 1992 and the protest at the embassy that resulted in criminal charges being laid. Another location is the family home in Sydney, as they wait a year for the trial to begin — a year that almost destroys the family.

Into this family catastrophe walk two well-intentioned but bungling Australian lawyers, who, as they gradually come to know their clients as human beings, become of some use to them.

There's nothing better than taking a show on the road to hone its effectiveness. All the superfluous stuff that is often mistaken for theatre has been stripped away in this production. The set consists of a few roughly painted panels, crates, metal frames and piles of newspapers.

All the rest is left to the audience's imagination, as it should be. Much of the lighting is by hand-held spots that the actors whiz around the stage, creating a furious energy and stark highlighting of faces and props.

And what a pleasure to see a show that has been thoroughly workshopped, reworked and fine-tuned, at the level of the script as well as the technical side. The show's writers have come up with much fine, poetic dialogue in this gripping drama.

There are scenes of torture and suffering, painfully portrayed. There is also lots of humour, black humour most of it, at the expense of the torturers. But hope is never lost, and they never abandon their struggle for "a beautiful life" and justice. At the height of their suffering, Jhila says to Hamid: "It's the blood in the soil that makes the roses so red".

If you're in Brisbane, don't miss this outstanding production.

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