09/29/2005
By Paul Hughes

TEHRAN (Reuters) – English soccer's most famous club, Manchester United, has taken centre stage in this year's hottest theatre production in Iran.

Extra seating had to be set up on the stage itself to accommodate the crowds who flocked to see Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rahmanian's F.A.N.S, which depicts a dysfunctional, soccer-mad family living in 1960s Manchester.

Now embarking on an international tour including Sweden and Canada, the play centres on the life of the Shelton family — Frankie, Agnes, Nancy and Sonny — whose first initials make up the play's title and its central theme.

"I had wanted to write about prejudice-induced violence for a long time until I hit on football (as the vehicle) and where on earth could be a better location for a football play than England?" Rahmanian told Reuters during a break in rehearsals.

"The research for this work took two years. I went to different Web sites, interviewed fans of several teams and all that made this play one of the toughest ones I'd ever written," said Rahmanian, who has never been to Manchester and has only briefly visited Britain.

Despite the play's foreign setting, it struck a chord in the soccer-mad Islamic Republic.

"I don't think it makes any difference where the story is happening when it's about football," said Taraneh Alidousti, who plays the part of Agnes.

The play's central character Frankie is played by Parviz Parastoui, one of Iran's foremost theatre actors and the lead in the 2004 smash-hit comedy film The Lizard, about a convict who dons a cleric's robes to escape the law.

Dominance

Frankie, head of the household after his parents died in a train crash on the way to a Manchester United match, rules the home with a cruel dominance, testing his wife Nancy, and younger brother and sister Sonny and Agnes on obscure soccer trivia.

But Frankie's grip begins to weaken with the arrival of a taxi driver who supports fierce soccer rivals Manchester City and whose charms prove irresistible to Nancy.

Rahmanian, who assembled the script through improvised dialogues during rehearsals, incorporated the real-life drama of the disappearance of the World Cup trophy before the 1966 finals in England to engineer the story's climax.

Frankie finds the trophy and refuses to hand it over. His wife objects and he breaks her arm in a fight prompting her to leave home with her beloved taxi driver.

Sonny hands the cup back to the authorities, but the pressure of defying his elder brother causes him to fall ill and die. Frankie is finally left on his own.

The main set is a cross section of the Sheltons' home. The walls are covered with old posters of United players and a clock frozen at the exact time on Feb. 6, 1958 when a plane carrying the team back from a European game crashed at Munich airport, killing eight players.

While the dialogue is fast-paced and often laced with humour, the overall mood is dark and oppressive.

"A hollow and distressed life is the only thing circulating in the minds of the audience at the end of the play," the Tehran Times wrote in a review.

Rahmanian hopes audiences learn from Frankie's story.

"Prejudice leads to bullying and dictatorial attitudes inside and outside of the family framework … I believe all of us, regardless of our differences, have a little Frankie inside us and we should confront him one day," he said.