The audience: Who could afford to go to the theatre?
The overall impression one gets from theatre announcements, police regulations, plays staged and selected memories from people who went to the theatre as children in the 1930s is that theatre had become an attraction for large segments of the urban society of Tabriz.77 With a maximum of 800 seats on offer at the Red Lion and Sun, the venue had to be competitive and catch the attention of a very heterogeneous audience. The price range for most performances was consequently quite wide. For prominent events, such as the special performance on the occasion of the millennium of Ferdowsi (Hazareh-ye Ferdowsi) that took place on the night of 11 October 1934 (19 Mihr 1313), ticket prices started at 4-20 rials on the ground floor (radif) and went up to 60-100 rials for private boxes (lozh).78 The price difference between the cheapest tickets and the most expensive places was thus 25-fold, comparable to the price calculations of modern, unsubsidized opera houses.79
So who could afford to go to the theatre? Of course, not everybody. But on the whole, theatre does not seem to have been an exorbitant luxury. The wide range of available tickets made it an entertainment that could be attended by people with very different social backgrounds. Almost all members of the new rising urban “middle classes”, vague and imprecise as this term appears, should have been able to watch performances from time to time. The intimate integration of theatre into urban society becomes obvious in the great number of charity events, whence performances or concerts supported flood victims, newspaper vendors or orphaned children.80
It is always difficult to place prices in a cultural and economic context. While a conversion of rial prices to contemporary rates in British pounds or German Reichsmark is not particularly meaningful (unless one is a specialist of European economic history), a random selection of prices for common goods and services from the 1930s might give us at least a certain idea. A bus ticket from Tehran to Qazvin was about 13 rial in 1936, as much as a medium-range floor seat in the theatre.81 If, on the other hand, Walther Hinz is correct in calculating the net income of an Iranian peasant at 24 tuman (1 tuman equals 10 rials) a year, half of it spent for sugar and tea, a theatre ticket would have been beyond imagination.82 According to Robert Byron, travelling in Iran in 1934, the monthly subscription rate for a zurkhaneh, a traditional centre of sport and chivalry, in Tehran was three tumans a month. This makes going to the theatre a reasonable alternative.83 In 1926, cinemas on Lalehzar Street in Tehran would charge between 3 qeran (equivalent to 3 rials) and 1 tuman for tickets, and cinema prices remained a reference point also for stage performances.84 Salary levels of state employees in 1938 started with 320-40 rials a month for simple registrars (sabet), teachers (amuzegar) and physicians (pezeshkyar), going up more than ten times for senior positions in the administration, medical profession, universities or the judiciary.85
Going to the theatre was also a family event, and children would be taken along. Women could not only come and watch the performances with their families, they also attended alone. Many posters from the 1930s state explicitly that the gallery and the loges on one side were reserved for women.86 Even whole shows or performances were “women only”, as can be seen in a small report from Tabriz carried in the newspaper Ettela‘at from 1928 about a special cinema performance, given exclusively for women on the stage of the Red Lion and Sun.87 The aim of reaching out to the younger generation is also documented: special student discounts (for the mohasselin-e madares) were announced for a performance of the comedy Showhar-e divani-ye dahati (A crazy village husband).88
