KARACHI: There could be multiple reasons for a story to end abruptly on stage, one of which is that the storytellers want the audience to feel a little surprised. If that’s the effect that the director of the play Pooja, Uzma Sabeen, wanted to elicit on Thursday night at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) then she accomplished her goal. However, one is not sure if the surprise was a good one or … not so good.

Pooja is, for want of a better phrase, a dance drama, set in a place called Sagarnagar. You would not be wrong to guess that it’s somewhere in the subcontinent or even closer to our nook of the world.

At the heart of the story we have Pawan (Vajdaan Shah) the son of a sardar, and his best buddy Akash (Raheel Siddiqui). Akash runs into a girl Pooja (Fajir Sheikh) in a festival and falls for her. Before he can say anything to the girl she exits the scene leaving behind her ‘trinket’.

But Pawan also has a thing for Pooja, and the love angle is pushed to the background as his father, the sardar, dies. This means Pawan has to assume new responsibilities of the leader. He does. Then the weather starts getting dodgy which the people think is caused by a curse, and a priestess is called to remove the curse. She comes, it turns out she is Pooja; Akash and the girl reunite only to invite Pawan’s wrath. To avoid spoilers, one should not reveal what transpires next. Whatever happens, it happens way too swiftly.

The hard work that Sabeen and her choreographer Mohsin Khan have put in must be appreciated. One knows that it takes a great deal of effort to learn folk dance moves and execute them well on stage. So kudos on that count. But there’s a lot that needed to be revisited by the director.

The dance sequences were on the longish side consuming too much time for the tale to build, some of the background dancers looked a bit nervy, and among the protagonists only Vajdaan Shah appeared comfortable in what he was doing. Most of all, it was the narration in English that sounded terribly anachronistic. If the voiceover for a character says ‘I shan’t do it,’ it sounds as if s/he belongs to the Victorian or Edwardian era that certainly doesn’t gel with the milieu that is to do with a community that lives by the sea here. The play is the last in the academy’s Jashn Sahwan Ka series.

Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2019