Headlock

Headlock is an underground theatre production by Iran Saye Theatre Group, written and directed by Mehdi Mashhour in July 2025.

The performance centres on two teenage girls and their volatile relationship, moving between intimacy, desire, mistrust, affection, and control. Their age is central to the work. Headlock continues Saye Theatre’s attention to adolescence and Generation Z that began with Base Camp in 2022, in the aftermath of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The movement had placed a generation of young people, particularly teenagers, at the centre of a profound social experience. Headlock approaches this generation through the intimate space of two young women and the ways in which identity, desire, and relationships are formed under social pressure.

Wrestling was chosen as the physical language of the performance from the beginning of the project. Before rehearsals began, the two performers underwent serious wrestling training. The intention was to make the wrestling an actual physical practice rather than a theatrical imitation of it.

Wrestling brings the bodies of the two performers into continuous contact. Its physical proximity carries an erotic dimension as well as aggression, vulnerability, competition, and control. This physical ambiguity became central to the work: the same contact can suggest intimacy or confrontation, affection or restraint. The body therefore becomes a way into the psychological world of the characters and into the changing nature of their relationship.

The performance draws inspiration from Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land, while reworking some of its concerns within a contemporary Iranian context. Rather than directly adapting the play, Headlock takes its questions around adolescence, the body, desire, and social expectations into a different cultural and theatrical environment.

The work combines physical performance, fragmented narrative, repetition, and symbolic staging. Much of the relationship between the two characters is communicated through the body rather than through dialogue. Wrestling gives this relationship a constantly shifting physical structure: bodies come together, resist one another, hold, release, protect, and overpower.

In this sense, the wrestling mat becomes more than the setting of the performance. It is the space in which the characters’ relationship is continuously negotiated. Physical contact becomes language, and the boundaries between intimacy and violence, desire and control, remain unstable.

Headlock continues Saye Theatre’s practice of working outside conventional theatrical structures and using the body as a primary material for performance. It is also part of the group’s continuing investigation of adolescence, sexuality, identity, and the social conditions surrounding the young body in contemporary Iran.

Credits

Writer and Director: Mehdi Mashhour
Actors: Farnoush NaderPour, Farsa PourHasan
Dramaturg: Sara Rasouli Nejad
Directorial Consultant: Benyamin Esbati
Assistant Director: Narges Sadeghian
Stage Manager: Dorsa Azimi
Puppeteer: Parsa Yousef
With the Accompaniment of: Hojat Salimi, Dana Asareh