Orghast - Week 134 of my weekly poems about my week for The Independent online newspaper.

Описание: In 1971, at the age of eleven, I was in Iran with my late father, Ted Hughes, who was writing a play called Orghast, directed by Peter Brook, for the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts, to coincide with the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was eight years before the Shah would be deposed and the first of the Ayatollah's took over.
I had always wanted to go back as an adult to see the ruins of Persepolis, the tombs in the cliffs at Naqsh-e Rostam and the wide open desert spaces again, but there never seemed to be a good time.
The first half of Orghast was enacted at dusk in the ruins of Persepolis. Then the audience had time for a meal and a drive into the desert to the tombs for the second part of the play, in which Prometheus was chained to the cliff face by the tomb of Darius 1, and a gigantic bowl of blazing oil suspended on chains was used to represent the sunrise. For it was at sunrise that the eagle came to eat Prometheus's liver. Being immortal, his liver regenerated overnight, and the eagle would come to eat it again every morning. This was his punishment from Zeus for giving fire to man.
Hearing about the sudden death of the Ayatollah Khamenei in an explosion on Saturday reminded me of my visit. Then seeing the rites of spring in the garden in the bloom of a scented edgeworthia, with a bumble bee, seemingly intoxicated, made me think of contrasts - and I was reminded of the contrast between the young woman I met in Iran, in her striped knee-high socks and with her freedoms in her choice of clothing, wanting to be more modern, and my stumbling upon (not literally) the dead man in the street who'd been punished under the Shah's regime losing his hands and ears - his tongue was also slit. I was told this was for theft, gossip, and eavesdropping.
When the Shah fell in 1979, the women were forced back into hijabs.