KARACHI: One has to give credit to Raghuvir Sahay for adapting Garcia Lorca’s play ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ into Urdu with a great degree of faithfulness to the original text. The reason for it is that the drama has a message whose directness is its forte; it doesn’t beat about the bush using convoluted symbols. Therefore, to shift it to another milieu seems easy but is no mean feat. Credit must also be given to theatre group Tehrik-i-Niswan for putting up Sahay’s adaptation ‘Birjees Qadar Ka Kunba’ on Monday evening with the same level of understanding.

Birjees Qadar (Sheema Kermani) is a domineering control freak, a matriarch to the core. When the story begins, her husband has been laid to rest. The family is in mourning. Birjees has five daughters — Fehmida (stepdaughter), Qudsia, Mushtari, Jamila and Adeela. She doesn’t allow them to meet or mingle with the men in the village. The daughters live in a suffocating atmosphere and are unable to challenge their mother. Birjees has a maid Hasan Bandi (Shama Askari) who knows the house and the family inside-out.

The asphyxiating environment has caused the young women to develop repressed personalities. The fact that they’re not good-looking has compounded the problem. This is the reason that all of them secretly like a young man by the name of Ather Yousuf who wants to marry Fehmida (Uzma Mazhar) as she will have the larger share of her father’s inheritance, but at the same time makes the youngest sister Adeela (Zahra Batool) get romantically involved with him. Adeela falls in love with him, despite knowing that it will not go down well with her mother.

‘Birjees Qadar Ka Kunba’ is not one of those fancy theatrical productions that try and dazzle theatre-goers with stage gimmickry, experimenting with the script. It keeps things simple and concentrates on the soul of the text. As a result, director Anwer Jafri managed to grab the audience’s attention till the end of the 90-minute piece on Monday. Of course, it had a lot to do with tiny deft touches, black dresses and mellow lighting to emphasise the grimness shrouding the household.

Shama Askari stood out in her role as maid. It did not take her long to help her character get into her own. When it was needed that she played second fiddle to Birjees she did exactly that; and when it was required of her to be a little mischievous to tease the unmarried girls about men, she was on the money.

But ironically, the actor that elicited the most exciting response from the audience (ironic, because of the nature of the story) was Zeenat Adamjee Bayat as Birjees’ 80-year-old mother. Her zaniness, in the tradition of the Shakespearean fool, was quite a sight.

There are a couple of things that the team can improve upon. For example, when Birjees Qadar hits one of her daughters in rage, it doesn’t look convincing. Actors know the art of simulation very well.

‘Birjees Qadar Ka Kunba’ will also be staged on Tuesday night. It’s part of Napa’s ongoing theatre festival.