Baran Theatre’s latest production Tower of Babel is a 'Monty Pythonesque' tour de force of conflicting emotions. The audience are lead into the theatre via the back door and actually sit on the stage as the two main actors slowly break down the barriers between each other. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a famous Romantic era poet, once said: “We are all but inconsequential droplets in the boiling sea of human emotion,” and tonight the emotions were running rampant.
The focal point of the Tower of Babel is that it represents human collaboration aspiring to unify. The play was mainly told through two characters: an Australian man named Marout, played by Steven Rooke, and an Iranian woman named Nahid played by Nasim Khosravi. The background story for Nahid is that she was a fiercely independent Iranian journalist, faced with writing what the Iranian Government wanted or going to prison. Nahid left her family and seeked asylum in Turkey. She then applied for and received refugee status in Australia and came here in 2012, and was delighted to be in a place where she could be “shaped by languages” and “be loved.”
Shortly after arriving in Australia, Nahid was staffing a Persian stall at a Multicultural Festival and subsequently met Marout and fell in love. Nahid goes on to share with Marout a number of unfortunate occurrences she has lived through during her time in Iran and this includes the experience of losing her Uncle in the Iran/Iraq war. They had been in a relationship for 6 years and were planning to meet her parents in a town in Iraq whilst on holiday.
All the while Nasim is moving down the stairs and across the theatre towards her true love Marout, and towards her love of poetry and freedom to be all she can imagine. Nasim’s movement across the stage symbolises moving down the Tower of Babel. Throughout the course of the show, Nahid spouts the following variety of vignettes:
- “Your loaded donkey shall outpace your mule”
- “Pinglish (Persian/English) is a sad type of Persian language”
- “The Middle East is a jigsaw touchscreen tablet”
- “We gather dust in the stairwells between libraries”
- “There are always missing Persian cats as heroes”
- “ The dogs of war keep crossing borders and invading homes”
- “War is the greed of great powers”
Finally, as Nahid‘s feelings unravel, and she is in the arms of her beloved, security officers suddenly come in and take her away for questioning (which can occur in Iraq) so Marout tells Nahid’s family not to catch the bus to Iraq. As Nahid’s Mother is prone to anxiety attacks and must not learn the truth, Marout creates a cover story for Nahid that consists of her being in hospital for emergency appendix surgery. When Nahid is finally released, the entire theatre audience is invited for a glass of wine, and a dance to Persian music, as the play ends.
The Tower of Babel had a warm family feeling to it, I wholeheartedly recommend this play be placed on a list for Primary School children to view, in order to focus on their emotions instead of computers. I kept thinking – this play would be perfect if John Cleese (English Comedian & Film Director) was directing and there were real live camels in the theatre. And lastly, a toast to Nahid, who always says: “May your goats have triplets.”
20th Nov - 30th Nov
Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts
By: Donald Gunn