Amir Reza Koohestani
Amir Reza Koohestani was born in 1978 in Shiraz, Iran, and is considered one of the most important Iranian theatre makers of his generation. After gaining experience as a performance artist and filmmaker, he founded the Mehr Theatre Group in Tehran in 2001, whose first play «Dance on Glasses» brought Koohestani international fame in 2001. After a two-year study visit to Manchester, he returned to Tehran, where he continues to develop and successfully perform his plays. Koohestani's works have also been shown in Europe for fifteen years. In addition to performances in Iran, plays such as «Amid the Clouds», «Timeloss» and most recently «Hearing» have also been shown at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, the Wiener Festwochen, the Oslo International Theatre Festival, the Zürcher Theaterspektakel, the Santarcangelo Festival in Italy and the Festival d'Automne in Paris. Koohestani has staged several productions at German theatres, including the Staatstheater Darmstadt, the Freiburg Theatre and the Munich Kammerspiele. There he staged adaptations of Kamel Daoud's novel «Der Fall Meursault - Eine Gegendarstellung», Yasmina Khadra's «Die Attentäterin» and Shakespeare's «Macbeth», among others. At the beginning of 2017, Koohestani realised his first opera with «Tannhäuser» at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. He presented his first work at the Deutsches Theater Berlin with «Philoktet» by Heiner Müller in 2019 and with «Woyzeck Interrupted» based on Georg Büchner in December 2020, a highly acclaimed exploration of the topic of femicide. Amir Reza Koohestani staged «Transit», based on the novel by Anna Seghers, for the first time at the Thalia Theatre.
He worked at the Residenztheater for the first time in the 2023/2024 season with «Pygmalion» based on George Bernard Shaw.
Productions
You are how you speak. Professor of Phonetics Higgins makes a bet with his friend Pickering that he can turn the energetic Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers in the street to make ends meet and speaks the broadest dialect, into an upper-class lady with immaculate articulation. Eliza proves to be a disciplined and talented pupil who manages to pass the test of entering high society. Higgins attributes this success to his own genius and automatically lays claim to her. He fails to notice that his teaching has helped Eliza to become a self-aware and thoughtful woman who is not only capable of making her own decisions but of acting on them too.
Pygmalion
