KARACHI: There’s a tender moment in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra, after losing the love of her life Antony, is about to bid farewell to this mortal world. She says, “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch.”

The line, in a manner of speaking, validates one of the characters’ compliment paid to the queen of Egypt earlier in the story: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”. These are the kind of minor connections that majorly contribute to making any theatrical production a resounding success.

Director Vijdaan Shah’s Urdu adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece as the opening play of the National Academy of Performing Arts’ (Napa) Young Directors’ Festival on Friday evening did not quite achieve that. But bearing in mind that Antony and Cleopatra is a huge undertaking and it’s the young directors’ event, one shouldn’t be too harsh on him because these factors are not easy to grasp by seasoned theatre practitioners, let alone upcoming artists.

The political and the romantic streams run parallel in the drama. Roman general Mark Antony (Tariq Raja), who forms the triumvirate with Octavius Caesar (Ishtiaq-ur-Rasool) and Lepidus (Syed M. Jameel), is in a relationship with the queen of Egypt, the beautiful Cleopatra (Kulsoom Aftab). When he hears about the death of his wife, Fulvia, along with Pompey’s (Kashif Hussain) aggressive design against the triumvirate, he decides to go back to Rome from Egypt. Moved by a sense of obligation and realising that the three should work together in order to nip Pompey’s threat in the bud, he marries Caesar’s sister Octavia (Ayesha Iqbal).

Antony’s marriage angers Cleopatra. However, upon learning that Octavia, as a woman, is nothing to write home about, she harbours the notion that Antony will come back to her. On the other hand, Pompey too decides to do away with the idea of picking a fight with the triumvirate. Fate has other plans, though. In the absence of Antony, Caesar fights Pompey with the help of Lepidus, beats him, and later on develops differences with Lepidus. This infuriates Antony. And tragedy ensues.

Antony and Cleopatra had quite a bit to sing praises for. Let’s begin with the hard work that the entire cast has put in. The set, albeit too simple for a historic setting, manages to create the kind of ambience that’s required for a tale of a bygone era. The director’s passion for the subject too is noticeable.

But the play suffers on two counts: first, a stilted script with too many platitudes; second, miscasting. Let’s take the second point first. When a literature or theatre buff thinks of Cleopatra, the image that s/he gets is that of stylised magnificence, of royal grandeur, of a woman consumed by hubris. Similarly, Antony exudes confidence stoked by power. Not that the two young actors did not do well on Friday, they are fine performers. It’s just that they did not seem to get the subtext of their characters.

Now the script: the translated version sounded like a laborious attempt at making Urdu sound just as highfalutin as Elizabethan English. Baz Luhrmann’s film version of Romeo and Juliet is the prime example of making 400-year-old language sound contemporary.

Ironically, Shabana Hasan as Charmian and Faraz Ali as Vintidius accomplished that feat (of sounding contemporary) by virtue of their free-flowing acting, outshining some of their fellow actors.

Published in Dawn January 14th, 2017