REMARKABLE ROOTS: THE VEIL TELLS GOOD STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S LIFE AMID TUMULT
By Elissa Barnard Arts Reporter

Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald, Canada
Nov 4 2007

The Veil tells good story of one woman’s life amid tumult of 20th
century in Iran and Europe

The Veil is a sweeping, epic drama that flows as fluidly and rapidly
as a good movie.

Based on Iranian historical fiction, Shahin Sayadi’s play takes one
to another time and place. It holds its audience in the grip of a
different culture and the strong voice of its women. Even Neptune’s
Studio Theatre looks entirely different with plush Persian carpets
on the lobby walls and floors.

The set, of dropping bolts of white fabric that serve as a screen for
projections and also become mundane things like blankets and doorways
is unconventional; the mix of Eastern and European music transporting,
the visuals metaphorically powerful.

Yet the heart of The Veil is its riveting story of one woman’s
remarkable life amid the tumult of the 20th century in both Iran
and Europe.

To get this story, Sayadi, the Iranian-born director of Halifax’s
OneLight Theatre, has translated and adapted the Iranian bestseller
Khanoom, a 600-page book in Farsi by exiled Iranian journalist
Masoud Behnoud.

Sayadi is blessed with two fine actors to tell the story: Valerie
Buhagiar as the old Khanoom, creating a rich and vivid character in
this grandmother, and Nadiya Chettiar as the granddaughter, Nanaz,
who also plays the young Khanoom.

Chettiar can immediately breathe the emotion into a moment no matter
how small. Whether she is nine and precocious, sick and pale, giddy and
girlish or desperate and pleading, Chettiar’s Khanoom has a forceful
presence and a clear, absorbing character.

That’s necessary since The Veil whips along quickly through many
short scenes.

It starts with the old Khanoom living in a basement bunker during
the Iran/Iraq war with her 18-year-old granddaughter. Nanaz is upset
that her mother is in jail and that she isn’t back home in L.A. being
a teenager.

Then her grandmother tells her her life story to demonstrate why she
is so rooted in Iran.

Khanoom’s tale goes back to a colourful harem in Iran in 1906 with a
beloved and witty eunuch (Marty Burt), who cures illness by warding
off the evil eye.

Also beloved is the rebellious Armenian aunt Nezhat, beautifully
played by Genevieve Steele. Nezhat dangerously supports the new
Iranian constitution and urges Khanoom’s mother (Lara Arabian) to
leave her abusive husband.

The new shah and Khanoom’s father are both ugly, dangerous men.

(Pasha Ebrahimi gets to play all the rotten men in this play and does
so with latent violence and relish in his cold cruelty.)

Sent away to Russia by her mother when she is nine, Khanoom ends up
in Paris and experiences two marriages and two wars.

Projected visual images take the audience immediately to Paris and
Berlin, inside mosques and fancy houses, to the streets of a vanquished
Germany and to the mountains of Iran.

This dense and epic story is clear. Sayadi has kept Khanoom’s voice
dominant in a play that is so rich in design it almost suffers from
an embarrassment of riches.

The key design motif is the cloth in white lengths with weighted
bottoms. Cast members endlessly move the sheets to create different
types of sets, props and situations.

In a play about a woman’s difficult choices based on family, love and
emotion the cloth easily connects one to the world of women. Women
spend their lives folding laundry, tucking in children, straightening
carpets and, in this Eastern world, wrapping themselves in cloth.

As metaphorically strong and visually magical as this technique is,
the endless resetting of the cloths can be distracting.

D’Arcy Morris-Poultney’s sensuous costumes, a labour of deep thought
and detail, ground this play in its different places and times.

The strong sense of reality is threatened by an occasional use of
puppets and particularly by a puppet doll with a giant, blank, white
head that represents a little girl.

Most of the massive technical elements, including Michael Mader’s
brilliant, comprehensive lighting and Brian Buckle’s evocative sound
design, are interwoven invisibly to create this wonderful other world,
as any good novel does.

The Veil, directed by Sayadi with a strong ensemble cast and a keen
eye for visual imagery, is, so far, one of the best shows this fall
for its thorough development and artistry. OneLight creates something
completely different without losing the joy in a good story.

The play runs to Nov. 18 as a OneLight Theatre production presented
in association with Neptune Theatre and Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia.

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