KARACHI: “I stumbled when I saw,” says a Shakespearean character in King Lear hinting at the fact that when he could see, he did not realise his follies, but when he lost his eyesight, he became wise.

Though this was not the basic premise of the first major Pakistani production Akhiyan by the Lahore-based Azad group in the ongoing National Academy of Performing Arts fourth theatre festival on Wednesday, it centred on a character that’s blind but is sensitive enough to feel the tyranny of time.

Akhiyan, directed by Malik Aslam, tells the tale of a visually impaired village girl (played by Aaliya Abbasi), who is trapped in a situation beyond her control. Yet, it is the way she feels what’s happening to, and around, her that is the force which drives the story.

The conflict in the play is revealed in the very first scene where Chacha (Sarfaraz Ansari) is in a heated discussion with his bhabi (Samina Butt) about the blind girl’s marriage against her will. He is the one who has taken care of the ill-fated young woman since she was a child.

The audience knows that an injustice has been done to the central character, which is expanded in the next scene when Aaliya is seen discussing with another woman (Rabia Butt) her new phase in life.

This leads the girl to further investigate her misery by wishing she could see in order to visualise the callousness of a society she’s part of. Of course, there’s a romantic angle to the story, which is a tad underplayed.

Akhiyan is a Punjabi play. While some of the lines in the script are a little hard to fathom, it is the spirit of the drama which enables theatre-goers to grasp the gist of the matter.

Apart from the dialogue exchanged by the characters, the play rests heavily on live music and dance acts which in a couple of cases work as the prelude to the scenes and on occasions as interludes.

One felt that both the songs and the first two scenes could be trimmed down to give the play a more compact shape.

Akhiyan will be staged on Thursday (today) as well.

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2015

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