KARACHI: The second piece of theatre presented on Saturday at the ongoing Laughter Fest organised by the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) was titled An evening of commedia dell’arte.

As can be gauged from the name of the show, it had Italian participation in the shape of its director Marco Luly. Apart from containing interesting small pieces, call them skits or sketches if you like, it was largely an exercise to familiarise everyone with the art form. And the more than a dozen actors who performed complying with Luly’s direction were Napa students.

The show kicked off with the mask-wearing actors running towards the audience making all kinds of sounds, basically urging them to be silent. It lasted for a couple of minuets. The scene was swiftly followed by the arrival of two Italian men in a clown-like costume. One of them was called a doctor (the audience were not told what kind of doctor he was, but the way the performers were searching for him, the audience could sense that he’s something of a philosopher guide). The doctor then tried to inform theatre lovers about commedia dell’arte, intermittently disturbed by another character who pretended to be a physically disabled guy asking for a coin while perfectly communicating with the doctor (as a normal human being). It added a touch of humour to the act.

The doctor somehow was able to say: commedia dell’arte came into prominence in the 17th century and was basically to do with improvisation. (And improvisation is something that Napa students are more than familiar with.) He also described the different categories of theatre plays that have existed for a long time.

Then the performance took an ironic turn when the character of a jester appeared on stage and uttered a lengthy monologue. Historically, a jester is introduced into plays to provide comic relief to tense situations, but here Luly, rather intelligently, turned him into a serious person, who apprised the audience about the genesis of his character in the world of drama. It was also a little strange, because after all, it’s a laughter fest that the academy is promoting.

Arguably, the most engaging bit in the show came when three kinds of drama were demonstrated — comedy, fragile comedy and tragedy. They were done as three separate skits, which were basically love tales where the conflict arose from the fact that the lovers weren’t allowed to live their lives as they pleased.

Some of the sequences in that bit were quite funny.

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2019