When Ferdowsi Meets the Director: An Iranian Conversation on Adapting the Shahnameh for the Stage

On 22 June 2026, Iran's Mehr News Agency published a conversation with the writer and theatre director Guderzai on a subject that rarely makes headlines outside specialist cultural pages: how to bring classical Persian texts — most of all the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi — into a working theatre that speaks to contemporary Iranian audiences. The interview, posted to the agency's Telegram channel at 13:12 UTC, framed the discussion around what Guderzai calls "text modernisation," a method of adaptation that treats the canonical verse as a script to be re-translated into spoken performance rather than as a monument to be venerated in translation.

The argument matters because Iran's relationship with its pre-Islamic literary inheritance is itself political. The Shahnameh — Ferdowsi's tenth-century epic of kings, heroes, and the cosmological struggle between order and chaos — is studied in Iranian schools, recited at state occasions, and quoted by politicians of every faction. The question Guderzai is putting on the table is whether stage directors have a duty to render that inheritance legible to a generation that consumes drama in short, image-led forms, or whether modernisation risks hollowing out the verse altogether.

What Guderzai is actually proposing

Guderzai's central claim, as relayed in the Mehr interview, is that a classical text only remains alive on stage if a director is willing to do interpretive work on the language itself. He is reported to be working on a new production in which the verse of the Shahnameh is broken into shorter performative units and re-staged through a contemporary directorial grammar. The point, he argues, is not to simplify Ferdowsi but to expose the work that the epic already does — its women, its anger, its comic interludes — for audiences who would otherwise encounter the poet only as a name on a school curriculum.

The framing is significant because it treats adaptation as an act of literary criticism rather than as a cost-saving exercise. Guderzai does not propose rewriting Ferdowsi into colloquial Tehrani prose, the way some commercial stagings have done in recent years. He proposes a directed reading: a director who knows the verse cold and chooses, scene by scene, where the original rhyme is allowed to dominate the stage and where the modern ear needs the line to be cut. In his account, that is what a director is for.

How Ferdowsi describes a woman — and why the answer is contested

One of the questions the Mehr interviewer puts to Guderzai is also the most ideologically loaded: how does Ferdowsi describe a woman? The honest answer, in classical-philology terms, is that the Shahnameh describes women in at least three registers simultaneously. There are warrior-women such as Gordiya and Farangis, whose courage is measured in the same heroic vocabulary the epic reserves for men. There are wives and mothers such as Tahmineh and Siyavash's mother, who exercise moral and political authority by indirect means. And there are figures such as Sudabeh, whose agency is described through the idiom of temptation and disorder — a vocabulary the epic itself partly endorses and partly dramatises from a critical distance.

Guderzai, according to Mehr's summary, treats the third register not as the poet's final word but as one tool in a larger narrative kit. That is a defensible scholarly position, and it is also a politically usable one: it allows a director to stage a Shahnameh in which the most discussed women are not the temptresses but the warriors and the mourners. Whether that reading carries the weight of the text is precisely the debate the Mehr conversation is opening up.

Why this is a culture-desk story, not only a literary one

Iranian stage directors who take on the classical canon are not working in a vacuum. They operate inside a tightly managed cultural bureaucracy, with censorship review and a Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance that vets scripts and performance choices. A director who chooses to re-stage the Shahnameh in 2026 is making a calculation about what the censors will read as philological restoration, what they will read as nationalist theatre, and what they will read as the kind of modernisation that lands a play on the prohibited list. The text-modernisation debate is therefore inseparable from the practical question of which classical works Iranian theatre is still permitted to perform at all.

This is also where the Western coverage of Iranian culture has tended to flatten the picture. Anglophone reporting on Iran is dominated by political and security coverage, and when it touches the arts it usually reaches for two templates: either the dissident artist persecuted by the state, or the regime-sponsored cultural festival as soft-power theatre. Guderzai's conversation with Mehr sits awkwardly in both. He is neither a martyr figure nor a state client; he is a working director making a craft argument about a canonical text, in a state-affiliated outlet, in a year when Iranian theatre is still working out which parts of its own inheritance it is allowed to keep.

Stakes: what the debate is really about

The structural pattern here is familiar from every literary culture that has had to re-perform its canonical texts under modern conditions. The question is always who controls the interpretive key. When a state-funded theatre stages Ferdowsi in uncut classical Persian, it is making a claim that the verse already says what needs to be said and that the director's job is to stand back. When a director insists on modernisation, the claim is that the verse needs an interpretive agent — that the audience of 2026 is not the audience of 1010, and that the act of staging the Shahnameh is an act of translation whether the director admits it or not.

Guderzai's argument, on the evidence of the Mehr interview, is that pretending otherwise is the dishonest option. A director who mounts a Shahnameh production and claims to be doing nothing more than letting the verse speak is, in his account, already making a choice — the choice to let the inherited recitation conventions of state ceremony set the tone. The modernisation debate is, in the end, a debate about who owns the canon in performance: the recitation tradition, the academic philologist, the censoring ministry, or the working director in a rehearsal room.

What remains uncertain

The Mehr interview is a brief cultural-desk item, and the limitations of the source material are worth marking. The article as published on 22 June 2026 does not name the specific production Guderzai is preparing, does not give a premiere date, and does not identify the theatre company or venue. It also does not record direct quotes from Guderzai in any extended form; the conversation is summarised in the agency's house voice, which means readers outside Iran are receiving a mediated account of his argument. What the piece does establish is that the argument is being staged in a state-affiliated outlet, that it centres on the Shahnameh specifically, and that the director's method of choice is text modernisation as a working category. Whether the production itself will reach a stage, and in what form, is a question the source material does not yet answer.

Desk note: Monexus is covering this as a culture-desk piece because the underlying subject is the relationship between a classical text and the people who perform it. The political and censorship environment in which Iranian theatre operates is named explicitly in the article, but it is not the lead — the lead is Guderzai's craft argument as Mehr reported it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/mehrnews
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Culture_and_Islamic_Guidance