TEHRAN – Tehran's Sahne-ye Abi (Blue Stage) Theater will host the comedy play “The Dinner of Fools” by Francis Veber from October 15 to 24.

Kourosh Heydari has directed the 70-minute play. The cast includes Ahura Ghanbari, Mahbod Mirzadeh, Mohsen Oliasani, Raheleh Heydari, Sajad Abedi, Shabnam Shahrasbi, and Mahvash Rahmani.

The comedy was written in 1991. The play invites the audience to see the strange ways of Pier Broshan, a Parisian publisher, and his friends. They are collectors. They collect idiots. Every Wednesday, the company of young aristocrats organizes a dinner, to which the members have to bring one idiot. A person whose idiot turns out to be the most believable wins the game.

With the help of an idiot scout, Brochant manages to find a gem, François Pignon, a Finance Ministry employee whose passion is building replicas of landmarks with matchsticks. After Brochant starts to suffer from lower back pain, his wife, Christine, leaves him shortly before Pignon arrives at his apartment. Brochant initially wants Pignon to leave, but instead becomes reliant on him because of his back problem and his need to resolve his relationship problems. He solicits Pignon's assistance in making a series of telephone calls to locate his wife, but Pignon gaffes each time, including revealing the existence of Brochant's mistress, Marlene Sasseur, to his wife, Christine.

Brochant is also able to make amends with an old friend, Juste LeBlanc, from whom he stole Christine. Arriving at the apartment, LeBlanc switches between assisting Brochant and laughing uncontrollably at his discomfiture. Brochant believes Christine has gone to Pascal Meneaux, a notorious philanderer. Brochant does not know how to locate Meneaux, so Pignon tries to help by bringing in a friend, Lucien Cheval, a civil servant who has Meneaux's details on his files. Cheval arrives, but turns out to be a tax inspector, to the further distress of the wealthy Brochant, who has been evading tax, and is forced to quickly hide most of his valuables. In the act of calling the womanizer Meneaux, the tax auditor makes an unpleasant discovery about his own wife and leaves, threatening to audit Meneaux and possibly Brochant as well.

Pignon eventually discovers the truth behind the dinner that Brochant wanted to take him to. His feeling is hurt, but, well-intentioned as ever, he tries to make up for all his mistakes by calling Brochant's wife, who had been involved in a car accident after leaving the apartment for the second time (the first time being when Pignon had sent her away thinking she was really Brochant's mistress). For once, he makes no mistakes in this conversation, speaking emotionally and sincerely about his own marital breakup (in response to which he took up his hobby), and making up almost perfect excuses on the spot.

However, after encouraging Christine to return home, Pignon makes a final gaffe: he picks up the telephone when she calls to talk to Brochant despite having previously told her he was in a phone booth, thus arousing her suspicions that he has simply been repeating lines fed to him by Brochant (as he indeed had been in previous conversations).

Francis Veber, 89, is a French film director, screenwriter, producer, and playwright. He has written and directed both French and American films. Nine French-language films with which he has been involved, as either writer or director or both, have been remade as English-language Hollywood films.

Some of his screenplays started as theater plays. “The Dinner of Fools” was turned into a movie by Veber in 1998 titled “The Dinner Game”. In 2010, a Hollywood remake of the film was made under the title “Dinner for Schmucks,” starring Steve Carell and Paul Rudd.

SS/SAB