Bahman Farmanara gets green light for staging “Man for All Seasons”

TEHRAN,June 21(MNA) – The celebrated Iranian director Bahman Farmanara has finally obtained the approval of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to stage “Man for All Seasons”. Iranian cultural officials under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had refused to authorize Farmanara in 2008 to stage the play. The play will likely go on stage in February 2015 in Tehran, the director of the Dramatic Arts Center of the Culture Ministry, Hossein Taheri, said during a meeting with Farmanara on Wednesday morning. Farmanara alongside with the actor Reza Kianian paid a visit to Taheri and discussed the play. The play, written by the British playwright Robert Boly, is being translated again for the performance, Farmanara said during the event. “The play promotes the commitment to morality principles, which is necessary in today’s society,” Farmanara added. On his 63rd birth anniversary on Thursday, Kianian said that his lifelong wish for playing the role of Sir Thomas More will be fulfilled. “I saw the movie ‘A Man for All Seasons’ by Fred Zinnemann when I was a high school student. Later on, I read the play and I have always wished that I could play the role of Sir Thomas More,” he told . The plot of the play is based on the true story of Sir Thomas More, the 16th-century Chancellor of England, who refused to endorse King Henry VIII’s wish to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon, who did not bear him a son, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, the sister of his former mistress. The play portrays More as a man of principle, envied by rivals such as Thomas Cromwell and loved by the common people and by his family. Farmanara’s play “Darkness at Noon”, which was on Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s, also was not authorized by the Culture Ministry in 2008. The play is based on a novel under the same title written by Arthur Koestler, which was published in 1940.