The essence of his theater.   

 Jalal's Cinderella/Writer: Hossein Mahkam^[1]

Once again Jalal Tehrani amazed me with another one of his theaters. In these 14 years that I have known Jalal and in a part of it that I was beside him, I was constantly amazed by his genius. Now in the main hall of the city's theater his Cinderella is playing and after a 4-year-old separation from the city's theater I go there to watch Cinderella. I still don’t like the city's theater. I don’t like the faces of theater newcomers. I don’t like the amount of time that theater students waste beside this building and all the enlighten groups.

But even after a year of watching the last theater by Jalal, Cinderella enchants me in a way that makes me feel really happy. The fact is that day by day Jalal Tehrani is becoming more of a philosopher. His unique style in writing, his fixed parody structures, stage designs that makes you feel the author dreamt this magical scene with high amount of detail or rather its part of his big adventures mind and a director without the fear of other people’s understanding and reviews. These are just some of the peculiarities of Jalal Tehrani and his Cinderella moving forward which parodies the animated version of the piece in practice and takes the signs remained from Cinderella in his audience’s mind as a place with romantic importance and plays a violent game with it. A game which resembles cohen’s works and why do we have to study Jalal from the outside view? It resembles Jalal’s works. His strange and unabashed emphasis on his actor/actress to say all their lines in a flat and emotionless tone without any rhythm to make you feel it’s making you lose the romantic values that the original Cinderella held in your mind and then the invasion of interrogative sentences in the final third and the invasion of all the pent-up feelings to that point and the sudden sore of the theatres tempo just when it reaches the last monologue which is another one of Jalal’s signatures and suddenly you feel like Cinderella’s world is stretched around you like a spore. These are all the joys of watching this piece. The shining acting from Golab Adine and Majid Aghakarimi relative to the other two good actors and the strange headlines which have parallel lines and angles with the words, separates the different chapters of the show in storytelling and even in these headlines the lovely playfulness of Jalal is evident, all these make me remember another one of Jalal’s theaters, Hey big guy don’t cry which was played in 2004 at the same hall in City theater which wasn’t performed for more than 10-11 times and what good times those days were and from the comparison of Jalal from 9 years ago to this day I’m trying to get to this point that Jalal is becoming more of a philosopher as days goes by. Becoming even greater. More fearless of the audience. More fearless of connecting with the audience. Because his theater brings the audience in his world and devours them in a way that even if they don’t understand every single detail of the script or the performance at least they will experience the joy of entering a world which they see. and above all Jalal does something that is only possible on the scene of a theater, and not any other medium. And that’s the essence of his theater.   

[1] Etemad newspaper, 2013