Encountering Oral History from a Theatrical Perspective

Reported by Maryam Asadi Jafari
Machine Translation Edited by Mandana Karimi

2026-10-13

According to the Iranian Oral History website, the sixth session of “Now; Oral History and Today Sessions” entitled “Encountering Oral History and Theater” was held with a speech by Amir Safaipour, a writer and researcher of dramatic literature, in the Firoozeh Hall of the Isfahan’s Arts Center.
In the first part of the session, Safaipour reviewed the basics of theater and said: Today’s session is about oral history. Let’s look at history in the sense of narrative or grand narrative, and consider oral to mean both spoken and informal. We are going to look at oral history from the perspective of theater, examine the connection between the two, and see what theater adds to oral history. In theater, apart from bodies and movements, a series of words are exchanged that are related to the narrative, speech, and informality of oral history. Those words that are exchanged in theater are called “dialogue”. Dialogue is not conversation. Dialogue is specific to theater and was later necessarily used in other spaces. Dialogue is a Greek word and means two pure wisdoms or two pure ideas; two ideas that are communicating and challenging each other and ultimately, one of these ideas must change. Naturally, with the change of one, the other also changes. The factor of this change is "drama" or "dramatic". When they want to show this change through dialogue, a process called "drama" - meaning action - is needed. Every human narrative, as soon as it becomes language and is supposed to be told to another, inevitably becomes somewhat dramatized and begins to establish a dialogue.

We said before that oral history is an informal discourse. When an informal discourse wants to become a dialogue and a dramatic thing, we have to give it a “dramatic structure.” When we conduct an oral history interview and ask a series of questions to take the subject to that exact dramatic point so that they can fully describe the story, we have to give that narrative a “dramatic structure.” In a dramatic structure, you compress and narrate time, place, character, etc.

A complex characterization of a human being with a "great contradiction" or "deep flaw"

The benefit of reading an oral history narrative is that you feel as if you have lived through a tragedy without having experienced it. This is the “catharsis” of theater. Catharsis is a Greek word and, simply put, it is the moment when your heart breaks because the event has been well defined by dramatic structure and dialogue and you have identified with the narrator. This is the benefit of theater. Not everyone is going to experience everything, and theater provides that experience.

Aristotle believed that dramatic structure is made up of these six elements: "time", "place", "conflict", "language (dialogue)", "objects" and "character". In the real world, there is no such thing as time. In the material world, there is no sequence. Time is a human construct. You can define 20 years of life in 5 minutes - or a limited time -. That is, we choose the events that are most important to us based on conventions. If you have had the experience of interviewing people present at war, you know that war is an event that shifts the boundaries of time. When in a few moments, your friend who is alive dies next to you or in a few moments, the greatest and most terrible fears come to you, those moments are never equal to ordinary moments in terms of feeling or perception. People who return from war are never normal people in terms of their sense of time passing. Because they have felt the greatness of how in a moment, everything can be gone! Now you want to take this person back to that moment with a conversation to describe the event. How is it possible for a human being to convey their unique experience or that of those who were in that place? This is done by limiting time. They must start from that critical moment. After that, we can go back or go forward. Because that time is the center of that person's life. In an interview with a war veteran, my first question was: "How many times were you really going to die?".

Regarding language or dialogue, we should never speak to the subject in an interview or book the way we speak to people close to us, and vice versa. You have to create the language or tone. This language must be changeable. If we don’t do this, we will get repetitive.
When we want to show the human complexity of people and create character, a big contrast or a deep flaw gives the work charm. We don’t all necessarily have big contrasts. For example, we are not necessarily poets and murderers at the same time. The more prominent and believable we make this contrast in a character, the more attractive it becomes. It’s like a skinny person holding 10 people captive.

"Theater" can be the output of oral history

We said that history is a kind of narrative, and this is the first point of common ground between theater and oral history. Narration has a beginning, middle, and end. In a real conversation, this beginning, middle, and end follow the logic of reality. When you want to ask a question, we proceed based on the timeline of the beginning, middle, and end and the time related to the narrator. This is the possibility that theater gives to the informality of speech. Because we can limit time and change the place of these three, and the more technically we do this, the better the result we will get. This is related to the time of the interview. Before you go to the narrator for the interview, you do a series of studies about them. But you don't need to start from their childhood. Go to the dramatic moment in their life that changed everything for them. After that, we go back to their childhood or retirement; like a light that shines and illuminates their life. The human mind is not linear either. We all change memories in our minds. You awaken that part of the narrator’s mind that is capable of being dramatized. The second function of theater and oral history is “participation.” We all have an experience that can be shared with the narrator. The association of meanings means one event that leads us to another event. If we can find a common point of conflict with the subject and from that position, enter a shared world, it is great. I have three long interview experiences. One of them was about the martyr Mohammad Montazeri. An object may carry a meaning for a person. The martyr Montazeri had a lighter that was used to identify his body after the explosion of the Republican Party. I maneuvered on this lighter. I dramatized it and included it in the book. Every time this lighter is lit, an angle of his personality is seen. Performing theater is also one of the tools you can use. Based on an interview you do with a person, instead of writing a book, you can turn it into theater. This is called realistic theater, which is very rare in Iran, and it can be one of the outputs of oral history.

If you proceed with oral history without highlighting or dramatizing, the result is a bureaucratic task that you just hand in and get over. I recommend that you spend your time dramatizing the obvious. First your own life, then those around you, and third, presenting these narratives to subjects in a way that attracts empathy. If you treat the subject in a bureaucratic way, they will treat you in a bureaucratic or formalistic or masked way. This is a fact. One of the suggestions I have for oralists is to go to the theater in a group and engage in dialogue with that group to see how they express their ideas.

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