Vis and Ramin — Baran

Overview

Sure, you've seen a love story before — but have you seen the love story that launched a thousand others? That'd be Vis and Ramin. Before Tristan fell for Iseult, Lancelot gushed over Guinevere and Romeo courted Juliet, the latter chased after former.

In the ancient Persian epic thought to date back to the 1st century AD, the titular young lovers tried to thwart their feuding families — and no, things didn't end happily. In fact, the influential tale is so jam-packed with rebellion, the rejection of social standards and challenges to inherited political structures that it has been banned in Iran since the Islamic Revolution.

No wonder newly established Iranian-Australian theatre company Baran has chosen to stage a new take on the story, redeveloping Vis and Ramin as a bilingual, multimedia contemporary performance experience. Nodding to history both past and present, the production analyses misconceptions of Iran and Iranian women, and interrogates the contemporary politics of the Middle Eastern country — and tells a tale as old as time as well.