KARACHI: Whoever thought of doing Athar Shah Khan aka Jaidi’s Good Luck Darling as the opening play for the National Academy of Performing Arts’ (Napa) Karachi Laughter Festival must be commended. Simply because when it comes to pure humour and a dash of satire, Khan Sahib is one of those writers who shot to fame in the heyday of Pakistan’s television industry.

There are a number of successful dramas to his credit that he has not only penned but acted in. The immortal character of the goofy Jaidi is testimony to it. For some strange reason, he is not discussed or interviewed as fondly and frequently as he deserves (one hears that he’s not well).

Good Luck Darling, directed by Farhan Alam was staged on Thursday evening to get the fest going. It tells the tale of Seth Razzak (Aqeel Ahmed) who has a daughter Seema (Bazelah Mustafa) divorced from her husband Sikandar (Samhan Ghazi). At the start of the play, Razzak is seen fallen on hard times, something that he talks about with his servant Gola, (Hammad Khan). He owes money to someone. Then it is reminded to them that Sikandar and Seema had a joint account, which they still do after the separation, in which there is more money than the seth owes to people. He thinks of his daughter and son-in-law getting back together, but Gola tells him that she can only do that if she first ties the knot with someone else, gets divorced again and only then can she reunite with Sikandar.

Sikandar returns to the house, seemingly willing to remarry Seema. In reality, he has nefarious designs, and is hand in glove with one of the seth’s competitors Khwaja (Sarmad Khan) who is eyeing the money that’s in the joint account. In the meantime, on the seth’s insistence, Gola finds a madman Badshah (Kashif Hussain) to have Seema’s hand in marriage. But since he is a mad person, things take one interesting turn after another, to reach a surprising end.

Good Luck Darling is as funny a play as one could write when Athar Shah Khan Sahib was active in showbiz; but credit to Farhan Alam for turning it into a laugh riot. The director, keeping in mind the kind of audience that shows up at such festivals, has brought hilarious slapstick elements with a great deal of movement into the scheme of things that one doesn’t care whether the line uttered by a character tickled one’s rib hard or not.

Then the actors do a praiseworthy job, especially Hammad Khan, Kashif Hussain and Faraz Chhotani (who plays Jumma, a jobless man that gets involved in the situation after being mistaken for someone else). Their zaniness will extract a laugh or two from the most reticent of theatregoers, especially the scene in which the seth is tied up by Badshah making him look like a catapult.

The other thing that Farhan has done is that he has tweaked the original script quite a bit, so much so that he even managed to squeeze lines from a recently held play at Napa into the script. Smart thinking.

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2020