The Tehran Opera Company was founded in 1967 by the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Art. The company was active until 1978. It officially ended its activities after the Iranian revolution. This booklet is the company’s program for 1974-1975 season.
Lady Cockroach is a short play for children published in 1929 in the city of Shiraz, Iran.
According to the cover, the author Mirza Jabbar Askarzadeh (often known as Jabbar Baghtcheban) was the head-teacher of a kindergarten in Shiraz. He later established the first Iranian kindergarten for the deaf, and was the inventor of Persian cued speech.
In 1933, following a dispute with the British government and Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the Iranian government demanded cancellation of the D’Arcy concession. The termination of D’Arcy Concession was celebrated in the streets of Tehran with a government-sponsored carnival.
These photographs show one of the earliest performances of a Western-style play in Iran. The play was Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice performed in Zoroastrians Club in Tehran , April 19, 1928. Majid Rezvani was the director. Arbab Aflatoon, a Zoroastrian, was the Merchant of Venice, and Kazem Bakhtiari acted as a female character. In those days the Iranian women still could not act in the plays yet.
* Photographer: Jahangir Mossavar Rahmani- From the personal collection of Yadollah Rezvani.
Siroos Ghahremani, an Iranian showman from the 1950s and 1960s entertains people in his private zoo in the city of Shiraz. The photos are most probably from the mid-1960s.
