Moulin Rouge may have set the Lahore theatre scene alight, but it has left a number of questions unanswered
LAHORE set a Thespian record recently. The staging of Moulin Rouge at the Alhamra Art Centre last month is said to have attracted the highest number of audience on a single night in the country’s forlorn theatre history, when an auditorium boasting a capacity of 1000 people was packed with close to twice the number, the spill partially accommodated by seating spectators in wings on the stage.
Absence of worthwhile theatre has wrecked theatre-going habits of the educated classes of this city of art and culture, while the unaware masses continue to be fed on meaningless and sub-standard productions. Theatre is no longer an embodiment of literary extravagance or social change, providing uterine nourishment to social and political movements. In more than a dozen halls in Lahore there is a glut of shallow presentations with a large number of producers promoting theatre on purely commercial lines, where low quality of production, besides the gimmickry of passionate dances, ambiguous dialogues and vulgar bantering among characters, keeps people with sophisticated taste away from theatres. Impromptu dialogue and indecent exchanges creep into scripts with the collective support and consent of the producers and the owners of theatre halls vying for easy money.
Unfortunately, the masses have developed a taste for associating entertainment with phony glitziness that disguises shallowness of themes hence, undertaken. There was a time when touring theatre companies and street theatre provided a better alternative to this type of commercial theatre, where if city theatre evoked images of superficiality and shallow slickness, the touring rural theatre brought forward images of dedicated artistes, who spent lives visiting even the remotest parts of Punjab.
Moulin Rouge, the musical play produced by Centre Stage Productions in collaboration with the Lahore Arts Council, is among the many staged by the amateur company working for the promotion of parallel English theatre in Lahore. The company employs amateurs, usually adolescents from selected private schools as actors, and it is pointed out that the company should not give in to the same glitzy shallowness that typifies commercial theatre, and should therefore, not disregard the objective side of this oldest channel of mass communication, hinging it on the carriage and dissemination of a blend of meaningful entertainment and social purposefulness.
Moulin Rouge ran to a full house every evening of its ten performances, extended on the directive of the Governor Punjab, and witnessing a more varied structure of audiences than any of its predecessors, as entertainment-famished Lahorites even with merger or no English-speaking backgrounds teemed together to be thrilled by the chock-a-block show. What was it that drove an otherwise not-so-theatre-happy lot of Lahore scampering to the brick red fortress of performing arts? How did the literary, or more precisely, Thespian predilection of Lahore’s theatre-aversive public rise beyond limits uncontainable?
One cannot deny that Moulin Rouge certainly came out as a well-produced, attention-grabbing play, with the level of acting, quality of sets, and over all production, much better than what we usually see at any of the theatrical performances held in the city. Some of the amateur actors, mostly high school students, in fact, acted too well to be called anything close to being amateurish. We should not, though, forget that Moulin Rouge, like all other plays formerly staged by the group, is a high-budget play patronized and funded by multiple well-placed sources, and better budgets guarantee better remunerations, and therefore, superior quality of actors, sets, and skills, putting the group in a sound position to elevate the standard of theatrics in Lahore by taking up beneficial and more relevant themes.
Plays put together by groups like Lok Rehas, Ajoka and Sanjh, for instance, have social value, a liberal approach towards freedom and humanism, and direct application to the wider lot of the society, with very good production standards, but limited budgets. Lack of glamourization of such plays keeps the attention-hungry, flashy corporate sector away from patronizing any of them.
But even with all the pluses of Moulin Rouge put together, they could not have been enough to lure audiences in such unprecedented numbers to the performance, as some of the company’s previous productions like, Phantom of the Opera, were equally laudable, without any of them ever witnessing such an unparalleled response. Exhibitionism, hence, sells in all segments, is unquestionably applauded, even by the educated elite, if conducted in a decent, high-tech, and glamourized manner.
Set in 19th century Paris, Moulin Rouge is about a nightclub, the lair of courtesans, rich and powerful men, and their entanglements. The play revolves around Satine, the most famous courtesan of Paris, and “the sparkling diamond of Moulin Rouge”, whose beauty has besotted the Duke. When, for no reason, Christian, the young penniless writer from London, breaks into a song with his Sound of Music, Lautrec hires him to write his new play to be staged at the Moulin Rouge. The star of the play is Satine and to gain financing for the show, Zidler, owner of Moulin Rouge, takes money from the Duke while offering the services of Satine in return to close his deal, part of which implies that Satine sleeps with the Duke on the opening night of the play. Meanwhile, Satine loses her heart to Christian, the Bohemian writer who has come to Paris to write about love and beauty.
Christian scribes the plot of Spectacular Spectacular, the play within the play, set in India and featuring Satine as the courtesan who falls in love with the poor sitar player, rejecting the Maharaja’s offer to marry him. The Duke does not approve of this ending to the play and wants Satine to opt for the Maharaja over the sitar player, just the way he wants her to opt for him over the penniless writer in Moulin Rouge. Meanwhile, Satine, who is diagnosed to be suffering from a fatal disease, tells Christian that she has been lured by the Duke’s material offers and pretends to have become interested in the Duke, only to save Christian his life and the shock of her own eventual death.
A dejected Christian vows to return to Satine on the first performance of Spectacular Spectacular, after which their romance meets a tragic end through the death of Satine and the consequential suicide of Christian. With its credo, “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return”, and the tragic outcome, the play is closer to opera in its emotional intensity. The musical score rides roughshod over historical facts, and some may even tag the play, as also the movie, as a grandiose pantomime.
With young girls clad in spaghetti-strapped, or off-shoulder low back dresses, posing as courtesans and dancing to the beat of a catchy soundtrack, depicting scenes and uttering words beyond their years and the social parameters of the society, the play presented an all-alluring prospective for the audiences not used to seeing all this live on stage. Additionally, as a play loaded with musicals and dances, its magnetism and exhibitionism was enhanced manifold, and a lot among the audience seemed to be there solely to be entertained by the dances and indulge the eyes. It was, as if the Moulin Rouge had come alive as a more sophisticated version of a low-budget local Urdu or Punjabi slap-stick production on Lahore’s Heera Mandi, strewn with sexuality, tawdry costumes, and suggestive dances, that would not go past the LAC’s censor authorities and that would leave the elite of Lahore scorn and sneer at the play, the same elite who formed a willing audience at the Moulin Rouge.
In fact, many watched the play again and again, hence over-choking already crammed up performances, while scores of those who had to return disappointed without watching the play because the hall was literally bursting at seams during the last four performances, asked why authorities issue passes many times over the hall’s capacity for a single night’s performance? While Moulin Rouge and its like are meant for the upper classes residing mostly in the southern half of the city, the smutty sexuality of their local counterparts is reserved for the lower segments heeding from northern Lahore, (which is why you would not spot a single banner announcing Moulin Rouge north of the Mall) and though, both types of productions are guilty of the same presumptuousness, the former gets away crowned, while the latter is shunned, charged with obscenity. What is it that leads to such crass discrimination? Is it the foreign language that provides a cover to English productions, where even phrases as forward as, I have to sleep with the Duke, and improper images depicting love scenes, fail to raise eye-brows, while similar phrases or scenes in the vernacular send us reeling in reaction? Or is it that what is originally meant for the upper classes may go unregulated, or further still, is it the backing and sponsorship of bureaucratic high-ups and corporate giants that renders such productions so unassailable, leaving one also to wonder whether these very sponsors dictate or choose the agenda of the productions they decide to undertake, just as is being done in the case of many television and other mass media productions?
Despite shining out as theatrical hits, plays like Moulin Rouge have little value for the culture or society at large. Even the film, from which the play has been adapted, has been quite controversial, and did not receive as wide and unchallenged laudation internationally as to be termed a literary or cinematographic masterpiece. There are innumerable English classics that are based on more beneficial themes and that can provide meaningful entertainment without having our youngsters to play prostitutes, courtesans and pimps, roles that should only be played by adults. And is it appropriate for the government to patronize plays that are meant for a very limited section of the society, and that if viewed by the greater lot, as happened in the case of Moulin Rouge, are only prone to mislead, confuse, and be misinterpreted?
It is easy to censure the simpleton in the gallery who jeers at the scantily clad girl on the stage, but it must be understood that it is not up to us to blame the man for such visual illiteracy. It is only a derivative of the society.
Moulin Rouge may have set the Lahore theatre scene alight, but it has left a number of questions unanswered 
