KARACHI: Farce is defined as a comic dramatic piece with crude characterisation and improbable situations. Ken Ludwig’s Tony award winning comedy Lend Me a Tenor is a tad difficult to categorise as such. But the National Academy of Performing Arts’ Urdu adaptation of Ludwig’s play Aasman Se Gira, penned by Babar Jamal and directed by Uzman Sabeen, is an attempt at pushing the story to the genre of farce with quite a bit to laugh at.

Aasman se Gira begins with a discussion between Maira (Irum Bashir) and Shani (Ahmer Hussain) about Maira’s father Chohan’s (Saad Zameer Jaffrey) agitated state of mind because he is trying to put together a romantic stage play. Chohan is an event manager. The story that he wants to do is the famous Punjabi folk tale Heer-Ranjha. In order to innovate he has hired a pop singer Alam Rushdie (Farhan Alam) to do the part of the flute-playing hero. After a few anxious moments of uncertainty Alam and his wife, Mehru (Shumaila Taj), make their entrance, which puts Chohan at relative ease.

Alam and Mehru have their issues, not to mention the former’s upset stomach. This becomes clear at the outset as the couple squabbles like schoolchildren. Mehru doesn’t trust him and this mistrust leads to a point where she mistakes Maira as someone that Alam is having fun with. The situation takes an abrupt turn as Mehru leaves Alam and Alam loses his marbles, ending up in a comatose state. Shani and Chohan think he’s passed away and from then on Chohan pushes the panic button, which enables the story to change gears.

There’s enough evidence to suggest that Aasman Se Gira is a cute little play. There are scenes, though not an awful lot of them, that make the audience laugh, and on Thursday night when the comedy premiered, they did laugh. The sequence of events nicely leads from one situation to another. But since Uzma Sabeen is very good at doing comedies, it has to be said that the play lacked the ‘wow’ factor. The big moments where she uses slapstick or, let’s say, uses actors to behave in a physically amusing manner to create funny visuals elicits response. It is the tiny moments, which can enhance the overall impact of the plot, that she misses out on. For example, the bit where Mehru finds Maira in the closet comes and goes in the blink of an eye. It is things like these in our society which make a difference.

Ahmer Hussain as Shani stands out as Chohan’s assistant. Despite getting the bulk of the lines his performance is measured. Farhan Alam is impressive in the first half of the play (why a pop star has a country folk accent is a little confusing though) but for some odd reason in the second half he changes the tone and tenor of his voice.

The play will run until Oct 2 at the National Academy of Performing Arts’ in-house theatre.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2016