Edinburgh International Festival 8th-31st August 2008

‘a theatrical style that combines powerful threads of Iranian thought, music and imagery with a deep experience of post-Sixties European theatre from Brook to Kantor, and with an unsettling mid-Asian magic realism.'

- The Scotsman on Bazi Theatre Company

Hunched figures, clad in dark silk, hover in a bleak and barren existence like the ghosts of a time past. Devil's Ship's five masked women are confined to an island, a fitting metaphor to the place many women still find themselves in traditional Muslim society today. Desolate, watchful, full of regret, they live in a virtual cemetery of silence, sand and sun, where the old ones keep the young ones on the island and the only hope for escape is for a man to come and whisk them away. "If you keep watching the sea, it will come into you," says one woman to the other.

Writer/Director Atilla Pessyani weaves a suspenseful tale, leaving a poignant impression through the abstract use of dark space and merely a few unbroken tonal elements. Despite a few minor blunders such as flawed supertitle design and indistinct video projections which end up distracting from the overall impact, Devil's Ship allows us a look into a world where dreams and desires are so dreaded, they are misconstrued as cursed obsessions even by those who dare to have them.

- EIF Critic Max Ribitsky

Although Edinburgh Festival-goers are nothing if not cosmopolitan, one feels that the cultural context of this story from Iran must have been foreign to most of the audience and that few would have been able to follow the Farsi language in which it is told. And yet it was able, by virtue of the simplicity of its narrative and the powerful, emotional performances of the five barefoot, hijab-wearing women actors, to engage and move.   

The action took place on a slightly raked, sand-covered stage, in billowing smoke eerily penetrated by four white spotlights shining down from above, which was supposed to represent a remote island where the women lived a life of isolation from the rest of the world, tending two family graves. Some of the most dramatic moments occurred when the swaddled occupants of these graves were revealed. We read in the programme notes of the influence of Peter Brook and Tadeusz Kantor on the work of the Bazi Theatre Company; there were surely also Chekovian resonances in the languorous pace and the endless talk of doing something which might or might not ever happen. The arrival of the old woman Bibi with a hookah in one hand and a transistor radio in the other should not have surprised anyone as the English surtitles (not always appropriate unfortunately - too much American slang) had made it clear that the story was set in the 20^th century.   

Insights into Persian tradition for example the tiny funereal objects set into a baby's grave, were particularly intriguing.  The sound effects too were excellent, conveying as they did the changing moods of the sea and the sounds of island wildlife. Some of the visual devices seemed a little awkward (could this have been deliberate?) but, all in all, this was a fascinating hour - and, given the rarity of appearances here by theatre companies from Iran, exactly the kind of original production that the EIF should be presenting.

- EIF Critic Birdget Stevens