Farhad Ayiish assembled a group of talented film and TV actors for his sparkling Comedy Of The Last Dinner, which had an extended run this past fall at the Niavaran cultural center, opposite Niavaran Park in northern Tehran. Ayiish's long stay in the US probably accounted for the American-style direct contact the players established with the audience. The action involved eight ingenuous eccentric guests at a fateful dinner party. Each one was so caught up in his own super-high-priority concerns that the others were but a captive audience.
As they ate their way through the hilarious dialogue, we heard about the bitchy girl friend, niceties of haute cuisine and wedding etiquette. All rolled comfortably along until an uninvited caller showed up. Death was there to claim all of them, courtesy of some poisoned fish that hosts Ma'edeh Tahmasebi and Ayiish unwittingly served. Much like Don Giovanni did, they first ignored the black reaper's menacing scythe and then tried to laugh it off. Implacable as ever, he even whisked off poor Ramin Naser Nasir, who vainly protested that he didn't try the fish.
There was a moral here, but Ayiish kept the mood light while poking fun at these pseudo sophisticates that opted for a strobe-lit Macarena to shuffle off to their eternal reward. The set consisted of one long dinner table laden with real food. Except for the awkward figure of Death, costumes were well chosen. Projected photos of each of the guests with voice-over narrative extolling their singular traits nicely set the comic mood at the beginning. The audience at this performance applauded Ayiish's self-described melange of Ionesco plus Monty Python.
