KARACHI: Let’s give credit to Sigmund Freud for turning the story of Oedipus Rex into a psychological condition.

You can disagree with the father of psychoanalysis when he suggests that some of the famous characters in literature suffer from Oedipus Complex but the truth of the matter is that what the Greek tragedian Sophocles wrote many moons ago to date has literary and social relevance — the hallmark of any great work of art.

The International Theatre Festival hosted by the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) commenced with a presentation of Oedipus Rex by the academy’s third-year students on Tuesday. To put it mildly, it was a pretty forgettable performance.

Oedipus (Tariq Raja) saves his people from pestilence and is made king of Thebes. He is married to Jacosta (Shabana Hassan) whose first husband Laius, the earlier monarch, was killed in a fight. But now another pestilence is imminent.

The people of the land come to Oedipus for help. Jocasta’s brother Creon (Kashif Husain) tells the king that they could be saved if it’s found out who killed Laius. The king turns to the visually impaired seer, Tiresias (Zohair Raza), to know about the killer.

The seer says it’s him, Oedipus, to which he responds that it’s a conspiracy hatched by his brother-in-law to unseat him.

Jacosta tries to salvage the situation by suggesting that predictions don’t always come true. To give cogency to her argument she tells the king about the prophecy that her son would kill his own father and marry her. To prove the prophecy wrong, she and her husband had left their son in the mountains. Years passed by and Laius was killed by some bandits.

The play moves on and a messenger (Hammad Sartaj) comes from Corinth. He tells Oedipus that his father King Polybus has died and Oedipus is the new king. Oedipus is reminded of another prophecy and says he can’t return to Corinth before his mother’s demise.

The messenger breaks to him that he isn’t Polybus’s son and was actually found abandoned in the mountains by Polybus. The dots are connected and Oedipus gets to hear what he doesn’t want to. What he does after that is for the audience to see, or not.

The performances were sub par and it seemed that the actors didn’t have time to rehearse for the play. Perhaps it’s unfair to blame them because they must be busy with festival’s preparations or it was because of the truncated script. The fact remains every actor appeared to be in their own zone, occasionally fluffing the lines.

Tariq Raja was punching above his weight. One felt sorry for Shabana Hassan because it appeared that she was thrown in at the deep end even before she could read her part. She has to be the most inaudible Jocasta ever. If Sigmund Freud had seen her looking into Oedipus’s eyes, he would never have come up with his famous theory.

Kashif Husain moved around the hall as though he was trying to sell something and Zohair Raza in a sherwani came across as an Urdu poet. If making the performers wear suits, army uniforms and sherwanis was an attempt to pull off something like Baz Luhrmann did in his film version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, well it didn’t work. It did not go with the pedantic Urdu translation of Ahmed Aqeel Ruby.

The lighting was fixed, which did not help create any effect whatsoever either. If it’s important for Napa to kick off the festival with performance by its students, it will do it a world of good next year to begin proceedings with a comedy.

Earlier, the festival formally began with a glimpse from the play ‘Shakuntala’ which is going to be staged in April. It was a decent effort enjoyed by the audience, but needs more rehearsals and a bit of flute and tabla to go with the music.