Criticism of the show “Rosmer Syndrome” directed by Dawood Zare; The release of the white horse

Charso Press: “I have to be alone when I write, if my play has eight characters, then I feel myself in a crowd of eight and they keep me busy. I have to get to know them and get to know the moral characteristics of each one.” “Henrik Ibsen”, the great playwright and dramatist of the 19th century, says this and continues: “Of course, it is not possible to know people simply and easily; You should be in touch with them and hang out with them. When I start writing, I assume that I am on a passenger train with my characters, we don’t know each other at first. But when we – little by little – came to talk and talked about here and there, I get to know their moral characteristics and recognize their strengths and weaknesses very well.”

The above lines show the importance of Ibsen towards the creation and development of his dramatic characters. For him, dealing with the three important layers of “personality”, i.e. physical, social and psychological dimensions, plays a high role. At the same time, he has considerable insistence on the type of dialectic formed between his created characters. As a rule, what emerges from most of his plays is that the key word “truth” plays a conceptual and grounded role. Although Ibsen is a critical writer towards the society derived from the bourgeoisie and perhaps in a narrower range of the aristocracy of his century, his confrontation with his roles is a remarkable event as he deals with the psychological layer of the character in the way of meditating on his created drama. This is what he affirms in the play “Rosmer Holm”, and of course, this path is also elegantly followed in the dramaturgized show “Rosmer Syndrome”.

“Davoud Zare” as a director, places his audience in an interactive and of course typical atmosphere. Performing in a space with minimal mezzanines, with minimal stage design and minimal accessories, and of course with live video projectors, confirms its interactive mechanism and brings the audience along with it. With this minimalism, the director will seek to impress the audience with the acting of the actors and their productive dialogues. Although the main theme of “Rosmer Holm” seems to be the election enthusiasm of the candidates of two competing parties, the possible change of power relations and the confrontation of influential and of course corrupt governments with the people, gradually the characters involved in Rosmer’s mansion move to their own secondary and personalized narratives based on conflict. on each other and finally turn the resulting situations into a challenging situation based on the main character of the narrative, that is, the character of “Ian Rossmer”, who was formerly an influential and trusted priest and preacher of the city. A person who wants to be free and leave politics and power and achieve his dream life together with his lover. In this dialogue-oriented show, “Yan” has apparently distanced himself from his political manifestos and religious and influential face, but the heavy and charismatic sphere of his persona and his social position return him to his original and stable position. “Dr. Kroll”, the brother-in-law of the deceased Rosmer, who is one of the leaders of the party in power, tries to make him his propaganda partner, and Rosmer’s not being burdened by dealing with his personal life and his new life partner, Mrs. West, who was a servant in the past. Rosmer’s deceased ex-wife was an event that marks a heavy turning point for the resigned priest.

With the development of the characters in the heart of the play and with numerous knots, Ibsen gradually approaches the climax of the chain of conflicts raised in the dialogues to the psychological collapse of “Rebecca West” and the related threats of Dr. Kroll towards Jan Rosmer, who seems to have restrained everything. is the climax of his narrative. “Ibsen” has benefited from strange and surprising phrases for his audience in almost all of his plays, he cleverly includes this verbal mediator in his works to bring his play closer to breaking the rhythm on the one hand and distancing his audience on the other hand. In this play, he also uses the combination of the imaginary “white horse” in the dreams of the hero of his play “Jan” so that finally this surprising, confusing and suspenseful combination of his dreams is interpreted as his wife’s corpse in reality, a technique that Ibsen used in most of his dramatic works. It uses its audience to face the bitter taste of the truth in the private hideout of its main characters, a process that strengthens the betrayal of “Ian Rosmer” in the mentioned play to lead him to moral scandal.

The whispers of fierceness and intensity of new political trends and scouting of the youth towards modernity and perhaps the uprising of the downtrodden of the society and the popular institution, especially its reflection in the new generations, is a trend that Ibsen has a partial view of in the play, in order to present the news of political and party changes and possibly the government structure in To think about the future of his country. Perhaps, by intensifying some dialogues that lead to the word “people” in his proposed interactive performance system, the director is trying to place his show in a critical-social framework and has flipped the status quo, although perhaps in today’s crisis-ridden and politicized society, this The way of direct dialogue should be reduced to a one-dimensional humor and remain at the level, and not come close to its desired effect. In the meantime, it seems important to address the root of the word “people”, so I will refine it a little.

“Georges Didi Auberman”, a contemporary French researcher and philosopher, develops this kind of discussion in the article “Making Sense”: The representation of the people, or in a more familiar term, the representation of the people, faces a double difficulty, if not a double impasse. This difficulty is due to the impossibility of merging the two categories of “representation” and “people” into a single concept. “Hannah Arendt”, the famous philosopher and historian of the 20th century, said that until we put both feet in the same shoe when we want to talk about man, in the singular, we can never think about the political field because politics deals with something else; With humans in the plural form, humans whose instrument of plurality is tuned to a different theme and curtain every time, either in the curtain of contradiction or in the theme of commonality. On the same analogy, it should be strongly acknowledged that when we talk about the representation or image of people, in the singular form, we can never think in the aesthetic realm – or the world of “perceptible” things that we react to every moment and every hour. .

There are only images, in the form of a plural form, images whose role of multiplicity, whether they contradict each other or collusion, does not lend itself to any form of composition or composition. This is why it can be said: “People” as a unity, identity, totality or general unit, does not exist at all and forever. In the show “Rossmer Syndrome”, due to the use of the word “people”, we are facing a politicized country that does not achieve proper demarcation. “Karl Schmitt”, German Catholic jurist and philosopher of the 20th century, wanted to unify the concept of “people” precisely only from its negative and powerless aspect; From his point of view, people only have a negative definition. The people is nothing like the executive branch, and of course it cannot be considered a full-fledged actor in the political scene. According to him, the people knew how to do one thing, and that is clapping and cheering to represent power. According to Sadr al-Sharh’s remarks, when mankind does not rub its eyes – when there is nothing to separate the images, emotions and political actions of mankind – then it should be said that the images are not dialectical, emotions have no content, and political actions themselves do not have a future. Therefore, what makes people “undiscoverable” is the crisis of their representation and also the crisis of people’s guardianship. This is a crisis that Walter Benjamin, a critic of Western imperialism, understood very clearly in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). He wrote: “The crisis of democracies can be considered a crisis in the conditions for the development of political man.” Therefore, where the champion of sports competitions and the star of cinema or theater and factional leaders of the sphere of power appear in stadiums or in commercial cinema films or interactive theaters, it is necessary to dialecticize the visible. In other words, we have to create different images, different montages, we have to look at them in a different way, we have to insert in them a combination of separation and movement, a combination of emotion and thought.

Although the show tries to enter the words of the people and draw its foot into today’s crisis-ridden dialectic, the bold dramatic and psychological aspects of Ibsen’s characters and chained and interlocked sub-narratives by Rebecca West and Ian Rossmer and others, each of them brings the audience to the atmosphere. Far away from the institution of people, it directs the audience’s attention to the personal and family crises of the priest’s family and Mrs. West’s identity, and what will happen to them in the end. This sharp slope from the middle of the play turns the post-dramatic narrative of the upcoming theater and the political matter inside it into a family drama and a chain of relationships, so that the post-dramatic event presented from somewhere loses its representation of political power and the play turns into a play with psychological integration. , face family and less social drama so that the 19th century continues to be called the century of dreams and aspirations rather than the century of human liberation.

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