Draft: this lesson was written with AI help and has not yet been read by a human editor.
1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to identify and describe ways in which drama and theatre contribute, or have contributed, to social, cultural and economic life in different times and places. The museum links a record of one nineteenth-century dramatist; your class will add other times and places. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- B3.2 identify and describe a wide variety of ways in which drama and theatre make or have made contributions to social, cultural, and economic life in a variety of times and places […]
2 The lesson
Who gains from a play?
Look at the expectation: it asks about contributions to social, cultural and economic life. Choose a play or a theatre tradition you know and ask who gains from it, and in what way.
Go deeper
A complete edition of his plays appeared at Tiflis in 1859, and a second in 1938 for the 125th anniversary of the birth of Mirza Fath 'Ali Akhund-zada. 2 His plays were translated into Persian and into several European languages. 3 He was called the "Caucasian Gogol" or the "oriental Molière". 3 The Encyclopaedia of Islam adds that he also wrote treatises on political science against absolutism and theocracy. 3
Think about it
His plays were printed in two complete editions and translated into Persian and several European languages. Who might gain from a play travelling so far, its audience, its language community or its author, and why?
Into the museum
- Mirza Fath 'Ali Akhund-zada: his plays, their editions and their translations.
- Tiflis: the town where he worked, as the museum's older records describe it.
Try this
Read Mirza Fath Ali Akhund-zada. Write two sentences: what his plays were about, and who first performed them in their original language.
3 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Mirza Fatali Akhundov have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
A dramatist of the Caucasus. Mirza Fath 'Ali Akhund-zada was the first writer of original plays in a Turkish idiom, the Azerbaijani Turkish of the Caucasus. Between 1850 and 1857 he wrote six comedies and a historical-satirical narrative, putting progressive ideas against feudalism, the corruption of justice and superstition. Pupils of the Azerbaijani state schools gave the first performances in the original language at the end of the 1870s. How might a play help a community think about its own problems?
I can now