Daily Times

I’m routinely asked why I prefer to stage Urdu plays over English ones. Then I’m asked why I prefer to stage plays written either by me or my protégés over those penned by established playwrights from around the world. It is a small theatre group at a public sector university we are talking about. The plays are mostly presented before the student body, the faculty, a smattering of alumni and representatives of officialdom. You have to contact PR guys to ensure media coverage, and no matter how hard you work and what magic you work up on the stage, the press does not really drool over the effort. The TV crews record sundry performance-clips and random audience views to make a ‘package’ aired in the entertainment segment of the 9’0 clock news.

The plays that we stage are well, just plays. It is, after all, an amateur performance at an old college auditorium. But this amateur theatre group was established in 1890. Some of its early members include playwrights like Imtiaz Ali Taj, Rafi Pir, Asghar Nadeem Syed, Sarmad Sehbai, Ashfaq Ahmed, Mirza Ather Baig, Bano Qudsia and Shahid Nadeem; thespians like Zia Mohyeuddin, Arshad Mehmood, Usman Pirzada and Salman Shahid; TV personalities like Noor-ul-Hassan and Sarmad Sultan Khoosat; and media veterans like Imran Aslam. The list goes on. What we do here at Government College Dramatics Club (GCDC) is important, not the least because it carries the burden of history and the legacy of Pakistan’s foremost performers, but because no matter how many glitzy commercial theatres you have, the old college theatre still matters, which brings us back to the practice of staging Urdu plays.

“Why don’t you stage the classics, Shakespeare, for instance?” they say. “Why go to all the trouble of writing yourself when the greats have left so much for us to stage?” I say, “If Shakespeare had thought the same thing, that the Greek playwrights had already written the best scripts on the most fundamental of human issues, he wouldn’t have bothered to write anything at all, and you wouldn’t be asking me to stage him today, would you?” They add, “That may be true, but the greats have bequeathed to us some of their finest cultural contributions. Why not relive them? They still do Shakespeare at Broadway, don’t they?” I respond, “Sure they do, but there are some forty theatres at Broadway. At any given time, how many play houses do Shakespeare and how many do original musicals?” In a vibrant theatre culture like that of the U.S. the classics are given due space but not at the expense of indigenous theatre. Broadway is Broadway because it went its own way, not because it ‘relived’ the cultural contribution of the greats. The Anglophile camp is not really convinced. They say, “So you are going your own way, well, good luck with that.” I answer, “I know you really don’t mean that, but that is okay because I’m still going my way.” I don’t say that out loud, by the way!

In Pakistan there is little encouragement for theatre and creative writing. In times of rising intolerance and terrorism, creative writing can help us examine ourselves, and our relationship with the world. Theatre can create alternative spaces of communication and help foster a pluralist society. Theatre can work as a transformative art, but it has to be a homegrown theatre. You need to speak in your own voice before you can examine how it sounds. This, and much more can be achieved by an indigenous theatre, not one that gloats in staging English/American classics, and thereby perpetuating a colonial ethos. The foreign classics can be performed sporadically; the way Broadway and West End invite foreign performers and non-English plays on occasion, but local and regional language theatre has to be centre stage.

That is the work we have been trying to do, I tell the Anglophile camp. We have been doing it for the last four years. It cannot compare with Asghar Nadeem Syed, Bernard Shaw or Luigi Pirandello, but it shares something with the greats. It is exactly what they did in their time. An unconfirmed legend has it that Imtiaz Ali Taj wrote Anarkali while sitting in the shade in the Government College Oval. This Anarkali forms the basis of the Indian film Mughal-e-Azam. We would not have had Taj if he had baulked at writing his own script because he already had Shakespeare’s contributions to relive.

There is one more reason, perhaps a rather self-gratifying one, for preferring in-house work. A play is just a play as long as it remains confined to its textual form. It is transformed when it is picked up by an able director and performed by a talented cast. One of the most beautiful moments in life is to see and hear your lines breathed life into. To sit in the audience and observe how different people react to, and are affected by the words spoken by the performer — your words — brings you into newer, deeper relations with life. You become part of something big — the theatre — because you have given your voice to it. It is magical. And I intend to keep on getting bewitched.

The writer is a lecturer in English Literature at Government College University, Lahore. He may be reached at sameeropinion@gmail.com