October 26, 2007	Friday	Shawwal 13, 1428

ISLAMABAD, Oct 25: A suspense thriller about obsession, madness and one murder after another - The Good Doctor - is exactly what its director Osman Khalid Butt had assured of “something Islamabad has not seen before.”

Like all good thrillers, the new stage drama that hit the Islamabad Club auditorium on Thursday evening, reaches audience differently. The story is complex, there is humour of words, blackmail, and horror, accompanied with startlingly loud sound effects the edge-of-the-seats thriller.

It is a play where one must always expect the unexpected. One bone-chilling scene follows another, as the plot twists and turns with devilish cleverness and with such an abundance of thrills that audiences were enthralled until the final, scary moments of the play.

After seeing the play, it can be safe to say that the stage comes to an age in Islamabad. And like chairman CDA Kamran Lashari said, “The play flowered into a level much higher than before.”

The complex plot revolves around the piercingly brilliant but eccentric Dr Cyrus Norton - played by the director himself - who is the finest surgeon in all of Philadelphia. He runs a highly prestigious school of anatomy. But his ambitions do no end there. He is also a man with a mission. Cyrus aims to collect and preserve every part of the human body, the normal and the abnormal, the healthy and the diseased, for display in his ‘anatomical museum.’ This, his life’s work, shall be his crowning achievement, and he works towards this goal with single-minded obsession.

But there is a problem. It is the early 19th century, and the law of the state does not allow for an adequate supply of corpses to be used for study, and dissection only the bodies of executed criminals and the unclaimed may go under the anatomist’s scalpel.

However, the peculiar love of Cyrus Norton for his craft is unconquerable. A passion so fiercely all-consuming that he will do whatever it takes to overcome the shortage of corpses in Philadelphia, team up with Scrubs, played by Asfandyar Munir, and kill his charming wife Grace Norton played by talented Mariam Saleem - even though they threaten to destroy the foundation of both his professional and personal life.

Towards the end, Dr Norton’s dark passion spares none. The Good Doctor pays with his life for his evil doings. And his sinister and devilish spirit lives on in his daughter Marilyn Norton played by Zainab Ahmed.