KARACHI: It takes a great amount of courage and conviction in one’s ability to try and redo a classic such as Taleem-i-Balighan, written by Khwaja Moinuddin, for an audience who is inured to taking selfies and using online cabs. Bearing that in mind, one must praise Farhan Alam Siddiqi for directing, and acting in, a reasonably fresh presentation of the play on Sunday as part of the ongoing Sindh Theatre Festival at the Arts Council, Karachi.

For a change, let’s begin with a tiny bit of criticism. The play was a truncated version of the story of imparting education to a bunch of illiterate people, so it should have made it all the more important for the producers to make its end look and sound less abrupt. This is the one thing that the audience found a little off-putting. There wasn’t enough, for want of a better phrase, a sense of culmination to the very funny exchange of lines among the five characters. No, in case you were there, the falling off of the pagri (turban) of a character was well-handled by the cast.

Now to the good part: Taleem-i-Balighan on Sunday was a lovely offering. From the get go, or from the moment the first character of the drama Maulvi Sahib (Samhan Ghazi) makes his appearance, there was energy on stage. Then come a butcher (Farhan Alam), a barber (Hammad Khan), a Pathan (Faraz Chhotani) and a Malbari (Shahjahan Narejo) as Maulvi Sahib’s pupils. The fun lies in the way the students respond to the teacher and how sometimes the teacher interprets difficult things to save his neck. For example, it is hilarious the way he defines the concept of democracy to them by asking them who was the son of a certain Mughal emperor, and since three out of the four students name one, he declares him the son by virtue of a democratic vote.

This is a familiar premise. What’s unfamiliar that Farhan does so astutely is more amusing. First and foremost, he makes Maulvi Sahib’s wife (who could only be heard off-stage) sound masculine. Then there’s a sequence in which Maulvi Sahib doses off as the students break into a song; at that moment all four of them start taking a group selfie with the sleeping master. Then the use of contemporary references, such as the Bollywood song ‘Baby Doll’, is hilarious.

However, things could have been more enjoyable if the air-conditioning in the relatively new auditorium at the Arts Council hadn’t gone kaput. It took the organisers nearly 20 minutes to bring pedestal fans into the hall to make the weather bearable. The noisy fans disturbed the acoustics of the stage, and sometimes the actors’ lines weren’t properly heard by those members of the audience who sat at the back.

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2018