London holds Afghan cultural festival

London's Tricycle Theatre has held an Afghan cultural festival, presenting plays, films, concerts, exhibitions, and discussion sessions. The two-month Great Game festival aims to provide a better understanding of Afghanistan's cultural and historical situation. The plays staged at the festival have been divided into three sections of Invasions And Independence (1842-1930), Communism, The Mujahideen and The Taliban (1979-1996) and Enduring Freedom (1996-2009), each focusing on a particular period of Afghan history. Ron Hutchinson's Durand's Line, Stephen Jeffreys's Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad, David Edgar's Black Tulips and Richard Bean's On The Side Of The Angels are among the plays that will be staged during the festival. The Tricycle director Nicholas Kent, who is known for his efforts to highlight injustice with documentary plays, says the festival aims to convey the message that how the lessons from history could help making future decisions, BBC reported. The term 'Great Game', which was introduced by British novelist Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim, refers to the strategic rivalry and conflict between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia. The classic Great Game period covered approximately from the Russo-Persian Treaty of 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.