About “Hamlet Behind the Mountain” / To be Hamlet or not Hamlet: Is this the problem?
In my view, Ibrahim Poshtkuhi is still postmodern. His intention in “Hamlet Poshtkuhi” also seems to have been postmodern. Came to try postmodernism in a naturalistic work; But naturalism is so ingrained in the blood of Iranians that no one sees postmodern mischief.
Theater News Base: The context of the play testifies to a Shakespearean adaptation. The title of the play, which bears the name of Hamlet in its heart and the history of directing Poshtkuhi, also tells us that he is an adapter. At least a few recent plays we have seen from him have all come from literature, and the well-known Hormozgani artist, who also has literature in his words, has proved to us that he has a long interest in literature. With such an assumption, we sit on a chair to see Ibrahim Poshtkuhi’s approach to Hamlet; But in the same context, this a priori understanding is disturbed. The southern boy, lying on the ground, plays the pieces of Bandar Abbasi in the style of Ebrahim Monsefi holding a guitar, and the play begins. An all-naturalist show about breaking up a family, the same as usual. In other words, whenever you see the foot of naturalism entering the Iranian play, know that one side is the family and the other side is disintegration, and in the middle of this situation, everything is formed around the father. In other words, mothers can not complete the family situation alone, and therefore, if the father is not on stage, his absence will cause the collapse. He destroys everything with his invisible hand; Because Iranian naturalism allows him to do so.
The show ends. The family breaks up. The father becomes disgraced. A child of a thief comes out of the water and another child of a murderer, and that one is an absurd ideal and, best of all, a passive nihilist. Time – represented by one hour in real time in the state of presence – proves that it is enough to wait two hours for the collapse, and of course at the end we reach the beginning of a cycle and day after day after day. This is also the naturalistic situation. Inheritance-dominated determinism is something that has condemned human naturalism for more than a century, and of course in the hours as I write this, man has been able to manipulate his genome, and the subject of inheritance is another certainty. It does not have Darwinism, and this is ironically a postmodern one.
I do not know why Poshtkuhi distances itself from that postmodernism of its former works and engages itself in naturalism; But one can weigh the naturalism of his play by setting aside this assumption; It is a turn of events that began ten years ago and became lifeless in the mid-1990s. Naturalism occasionally shows up – like “White Soil” – but to no avail. The backstory play also appears in such a situation, and ironically, after getting rid of the context of the play, one feels how familiar the image on the stage is: “Friday noon story”. Another show in which the collapse of the family depends on the father on the eve of his death is the death of the family. Mohammad Masawat’s play was an important event in the early 1990s. The play is flourishing and has been performed many times by various directors in the last ten years. “Hamlet Poshtkuhi”, although not related to equality in the story; But they have many similarities in naturalistic aesthetics. The insistence and exaggeration on the real representation of the life of families outside the center of biomedia has become, and of course the expansion of the family in the turbulent sixties. The Iranian family, which is not yet involved in the strange relations of the modern world after the war, realizes its identity in its unity, so much so that despite the father’s second marriage, the mother of the family has not left the house as is customary today.
But the show is not about not leaving. It is not even about the father remarrying. Perhaps the confrontation between these two issues does not cause the family to collapse. The show of Poshtkuhi suffers from the same disease that basically the Iranian dramas of Egypt suffer from realism, and in the postmodern approach, this disease is treated due to the widespread use of imagination and fantasy. The mass of events and knots are accumulated in such a way that the end of the play is not only unrealistic, but also unravels in a super-imaginary situation and with the compulsion of a monologue – not an action.
In the play “Hamlet Poshtkuhi”, Mahan is the grandson of the family in the hospital and dies if the necessary money is not provided – of course, the end of the play shows that Mahan’s story is incomplete and it is basically not clear how to get the child out of the coma -; But surprisingly, the mother stays at her father’s house for two hours and eats dinner, laughs, fights, cries, reveals the secrets of each family member, and finally, with a monologue, determines the death of the family !!? I do not intend to reveal the story of the play; But suffice it to say that in the portrayal of each character in the face of a general crisis, their secrets are revealed; But it is not solved, and suddenly, in the accumulation of information, the daughter of the Phoenix family sets herself on fire until the show is over. In other words, like the traditional realism in Anglo-Saxon drama, which is common in Hollywood, Poshtkuhi does not open some of them in the middle of the road in his many knots. He releases the crumbs to untie them with the king knot.
The first question is how in a realistic context does the mother – that is, the mother who is also Mahan – stay in the house of the father – who, incidentally, is not a proper and safe refuge – and does not even hear from her son? How is it that the police were not involved in the incident, knowing that the child had been beaten by the husband? How is it that during the robbery of one of the brothers, there is no news about the police in the neighborhood and even the narrations? In our naturalistic world, have people been eliminated by the police? Elimination into non-existent and invisible parallels may be the result of postmodernism in which the mountain is more masterful than naturalism.
Freedom of action in the postmodern world, at least in its executive form, leaves the artist free to engage in personal reading; But when we step into a natural history, the audience’s branches become sensitive to realize how much the artist is trying to narrate history directly. For example, we know that the play takes place in 1990; But the utterance of Houshang Golshiri at the funeral of Mohammad Mokhtari in December 1998 is a postmodern game from the mouth of the daughter of the family, and it is in a postmodern context that does not find any function. Of course, one should also doubt about the broadcast of the series “Years Away from Home” in 1990, after the controversy of that so-called interview.
In my view, Ibrahim Poshtkuhi is still postmodern. His intention in “Hamlet Poshtkuhi” also seems to have been postmodern. Came to try postmodernism in a naturalistic work; But naturalism is so ingrained in the blood of Iranians that no one sees postmodern mischief. It is as if Mahan – who bears a phonological resemblance to Hamlet – is the prince of the story who has left the scene, and now the whole family, each of whom can have a reference to Hamlet’s characters, is in turmoil in his absence; But no one understands this. One does not even ask why the eldest son does not have a Hormozgani dialect and how the father got a second wife from Yazd and why the southern dialects are not the same. Ironically, the play “Hamlet Behind the Mountain” would have been even more successful if it had become a television series; Because he has attractive ideas for the Iranian people; But for Ibrahim Poshtkuhi himself, I do not know.