“Savior in a Wet Morning” written by Akbar Radi, Representation of Theatre Field in the Late Fifties

Akbar Radi, a realistic playwright and one of the most influential figures in Iran's modern theater field, has represented the intellectual atmosphere of Iranian art in many of his works including “Hamlet with Season Salad” (1978) and “Night on the Wet Cobblestone” (1999). His play “Savior on a Wet Morning” (1979) is the only work in which the positions of the theater agents in the social atmosphere of the late 50s have been reflected in a representative way. The present study, in the light of Bourdieu's theory of action, considers the characters of the play as agents of the art and theater field including the playwright, director and publisher, literary critic, and magazine owner as well as their habitus and capital and studies interaction of this field with the field of power, in order to search beyond objective or subjective approaches and to reveal the relationship between the author's position in the theater field and his position in his work. The study of the represented theater field indicates that the tendency of the actors of the theater field in the above-mentioned decade, including producers and distributors towards fields such as politics and economy has caused the loss of autonomy of the field, and the actors who, according to their symbolic capital tried to maintain the autonomy of art and remain in the position of independent art, lost their biological and artistic life in a fragmented field. This study, with the method proposed by Bourdieu, in a documentary and autobiographical way, has followed the trajectory of the author and the main character of the play, considering the possibilities of the theater field in the late ‘50s, in order to identify the homology of the author and the main character as the ultimate goal of the study. The result of this article indicates that considering the possibilities of the studied era, the structural similarity of Radi's position in the play shows the positions of a number of independent theater artists at the end of that decade whose artistic lives were jeopardized by the slipping of the field towards the poles of politics and economy.