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The cobblestones stretched out under our feet, as if we were in a square. “Are you uncomfortable?” asks actress Oldoz Javidi as she urges schoolchildren and teachers to sit up straight on the floor and sit there for the entire performance. It lasts 58 minutes. “We sat for 58 days,” she says simply but with encouraging pride in her voice. And so he enters the role of Fatemeh Khavari.
The stone cladding is a photo-printed floor mat, which covers the stage in the newly opened Kulturhuset Stadsteatern Husby black box. Here in the new Kulturskolan building next to the square in the center of Husby, Stadsteatern conducts performing arts and co-creative activities for youth and young adults. Immediately after the opening in March, everything was affected by the pandemic, now the new sensation of beginning is tingling in the air when the hour of the premiere arrives again.
“I Stay to the End” is based on Fatemeh Khavari’s autobiographical book, written by journalist Annie Hellquist. When 17-year-old Khavari sat in Mynttorget one summer day in 2017 to strike against deportations of young people to Afghanistan, she started a popular movement and became a leading activist. Ten protesters quickly turned into a thousand and more, the youth movement in Sweden grew, and in May the following year the Riksdag approved the proposal that 9,000 unaccompanied minors be given a new chance to stay.
When 17-year-old Khavari sat in Mynttorget one summer day in 2017 to strike against deportations of young people to Afghanistan, he started a popular movement and became a leading activist.
The book is a bit like a me-shaped report. He alternates the course of events around the sit-in with the upbringing of Khavari: in Iran, where his parents fled Afghanistan, in Sweden since 2015 through family reunification with his brother who moved here. Stina Oscarson’s dramatization concentrates the text very well in just under an hour with almost no clips being visible. Tereza Andersson’s direction is simple and energetic, the nude ensemble is realistic in tone.
In Torulf Wetterrot’s set, there is a ladder formation that is pushed through the ground, to withstand changes in time and space, but also how the demo literally moves, from Mynttorget to Medborgarplatsen to Norra Bantorget. Officials in yellow vests act as extras and stage workers, handing out seat cushions, sleeping bags and candy.
“I Stay Until the End” is an effective lesson in contemporary history and immigration policy. Its somewhat static lecture form is offset by Javidi’s pondus and calm glow. She portrays how Fatima, endowed only with courage and mobility, tackles politicians, the media, the Nazis and conflicts. And he radiates with his eyes the sadness and pain that history contains, the cycle of injustices of which it speaks. She does the show as a single long speech for the young people sitting with her on the floor.
Read more reviews of stages in DN here.
