NAPA brings classic play to life with plethora of talent
By Fawad Ali Shah
KARACHI: Imagine what would happen if Anton Chekhov writes a play, Zia Mohyeddin directs it while Talat Hussain, Rahat Kazmi and Arshad Hussain, accompanied by the graduates of the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) Repatriate Theater, perform in it?
The result ladies and gentlemen would be a theatrical masterpiece.
NAPA is back with yet another amazing production, namely ‘Seagull’, written by veteran Russian dramatist Anton Cheakhov.
Seagull’s story revolves around different human relations. It has love, hate, deceit and sincerity, sprinkled with words of wisdom.
Chekhov has written the script very artfully and has shown how professional jealousy can wreck havoc on blood relations. How love and hate relations are developed and how despite the most professional working atmosphere some people are not ready to accept the superiority of others.
The drama takes off in a village, which has a lake and is very green. The stage is set on the side of the lake, where people are slowly gathering to see a play written and produced by an aspiring writer, ‘KonstantinÂ’ with his lover, Nina (Ayman Tariq), playing the main character in it. Konstantin is a reformist and wants to change the traditional way plays are made, hence he has written and produced a drama which is out of the box and is now getting ready to stage the play for his friends and family.
As the story moves forward, it reveals that Konstantin’s father died a few years ago and after his father’s death his mother, a theater actor, has been living with a well-known Russian writer.
Dr Dorn, 55, is a friend of Sorin, who is KonstantinÂ’s elderly uncle and he also comes to watch the play while Masha, who is Konstantin’s mother’s manager’s daughter, also comes to see what Konstantin is about to show. Following close behind, comes Medvedenko, who is Masha’s lover.
Even Konstantin’s mother comes to be a part of her son’s first play and with her she brings Trigorin, her Russian lover.
The plot of the play then thickens and one can see the chains of love hate relationships forming. Slowly in the light of the love and hate relationships, or rather just the hate in this case, tragedies start surfacing.
“A man roaming about a lake kills a seagull purposely and another one destroyed the life of a human purposely,” is a dialogue said by Rahat Qazmi during the climax of the play, when the audiences are as good as intoxicated by the performance.
This production can be regarded as one of the best ever productions of NAPA. What is fascinating is not the performance of the great artists, as they are always, it seems, at their peak, but in fact the performance of the young graduates of NAPA, including Ayman Tariq, Saqib Khan and Akbar Islam. They have all performed difficult roles to perfection and their performances show a promising future for the country’s drama culture.
Source: Daily Times
Date:9/26/2009
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