FOR the last few years, stage productions in Lahore have been monopolized by those who are more into commercial theatre. With the passage of time, commercialism brought vulgarity into stage plays, causing a steady decline in this oldest art form. Ajoka Theatre is the only group that has stuck to its programme of churning out serious, quality plays. However, these days we are witnessing re-emergence of serious theatre in Lahore. In this regard, recently Rafi Pir Theatre celebrated its annual theatre festival in a big way. Theatre groups from different countries took part in the festival and staged their plays.
The event was followed by another festival entitled the Ibsen National Drama Festival which lasted for 12 days. In between, Ajoka Theatre staged its production of short plays based on three short stories selected from post-partition Urdu fiction. It was an experiment of its own kind.
Dramatizing short stories can be a risky business. It is a different kind of genre. It doesn’t easily meet the demands of dramatic presentation. As far as Ajoka’s presentation goes, producer Madiha Gauhar took care of the fact that the essence of short story writing was not sacrificed for the sake of drama production.
The three stories were not selected at random. They covered the crisis-ridden history of Pakistan. The first was Sadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, which effectively portrays human tragedy caused by the transfer of population in 1947. The next was Ghulam Abbas’s Hotel Mohenjodaro (originally titled Dhanak) in which the story writer foresees Pakistan drifting towards Talibanization. The third was Shehr-i-Afsaus written by this writer, a story about the events caused by East Pakistan’s disintegration.
Choosing such stories was an attempt to integrate Pakistan’s theatre into its national life in contradistinction to the theoretical activity that relies solely on adaptations from dramas of the West.
Here I will say a few words about the first two stories, leaving the third one for other critics to judge.
Communal riots during partition of the subcontinent and there after-effects can be consistently found in Manto’s stories. Out of his many tales perhaps the most outstanding is Toba Tek Singh, which delineates very forcefully the tragic situation and irony created by the exchange of uprooted population of India and Pakistan at the time of partition. The story has been a favourite of Ajoka Theatre for long, a fact that made the group once again present it on stage at the Lahore Arts Council. Remaining faithful to the text, Ajoka succeeded in turning the short piece into a play, which in the end proved to be a very worthwhile presentation.
Ghulam Abbas penned Dhanak in the late ‘60s. Ajoka performed it as Hotel Mohenjodaro. In the foreword to the book in which the story was published four decades ago, Ghulam Abbas wrote: “I have just expressed my apprehensions about the future of the nation as I had felt them in the form of a story, which happens to be my medium of expression”. It turned out that he was quite prophetic in expressing his doubts. The story is still relevant to our times. But I wonder why Ajoka was hesitant in presenting it as a full-fledged play. The group presented the story only through reading. It could have had a narrator, who would have easily filled up the blanks by narrating what was difficult to dramatize.
If we choose to present a story through recitation, the best man available for the purpose in our times is Zia Moheyuddin.
This reminds me of a Dec 31 evening when I had the opportunity to listen to Zia Moheyuddin. A packed audience at the spacious hall of the Ali Auditorium was spellbound while listening to him. Should I compare him with Mir Baqar Ali Dastango, whose demise brought the age-old tradition of Dastangoi to an end? But Zia Moheyuddin has evolved his own style, very different from the old Dastan narrators.
Every year Zia Moheyuddin comes up with a new selection from Urdu prose along with a few verse selections. But he is well aware of the fact that the majority of his admirers are more attuned to English literature, so he also chooses some excerpts from English literature.
Zia selects pieces from works of both the old masters and new writers. But I have a feeling that he particularly relishes the prose written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
As for poetry, he enjoys the free verse of Noon Meem Rashid more than anything else.
FOR the last few years, stage productions in Lahore have been monopolized by those who are more into commercial theatre. With the passage of time, commercialism brought vulgarity into stage plays, causing a steady decline in this oldest art form. Ajoka Theatre is the only group that has stuck to its programme of churning out serious, quality plays. However, these days we are witnessing re-emergence of serious theatre in Lahore. In this regard, recently Rafi Pir Theatre celebrated its annual theatre festival in a big way. Theatre groups from different countries took part in the festival and staged their plays.
