Albert Camus’s play “The Misunderstanding” directed by Javad Molania is being performed at Molavi Theater Hall in its original language.
The play is performed in French by a group of students from Tehran University’s Faculty of Foreign Languages, ISNA reported.
It is the story of a man who returns home from a long journey to find his sister and widowed mother making a living by renting their house as a guest house to rich travelers and murdering them. As the two women fail to recognize him, he books a room in his own home without revealing his true identity.
The cast includes Nazanin Khalilian, Mahshad Bahraminejad, Mehrnaz Farahani and Mohammad Zebhi.
Camus wrote the play in 1943 during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany in WWII. It contains symbols and metaphors, presenting the elements of Greek tragedy and focuses on his idea of the Theater of the Absurd.
Theatre of the Absurd is a post World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s including Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. Their work focused largely on the idea of existentialism and expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose.
Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French philosopher, author and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy of Absurdism. He has written five novels, seven short stories and six plays alongside many essays. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at the age of 44. The show will run until August 10.
