I imagine Nimra Bucha would be absolutely depleted after her unrelenting performance in the Urdu adaptation of Florian Zeller’s French play The Mother.
I wait for her in the emptying Zia Mohyeddin Theatre at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) as the rest of the audience files out of the theatre, still coming to terms with the blunt force of the play and its performances.
But, much to my surprise, Nimra comes bounding out from backstage a few moments later like a schoolchild at recess, with a bag slung over one shoulder and her characteristic wide grin on display as she gives her husband, the writer Mohammed Hanif, updates over the phone about the play’s first show at Napa.
Nimra’s been at the heart of two of the most memorable plays I’ve seen staged in Karachi over the past two decades: Begum Jaan and Mushk. Based on that track record, it’s evident that she isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. And make no mistake, The Mother is a challenge.
FROM PARIS TO KARACHI
Zeller’s The Mother is one of the three plays in his informal ‘family trilogy’, alongside The Father (which some of you may recall due to Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning performance in the play’s film adaptation) and The Son. Like the others, it is not a conventional family drama but, instead, a psychological dissection of a mind in crisis, told from the inside rather than from an objective point of view.
Translated and directed by Usama Khan, and presented by The Last Show, The Mother has no neat inciting incident, no clear villain and no obvious moral.
As Nimra Bucha returns to the stage in Karachi with a blistering performance in The Mother, the cast and crew behind this emotionally unsparing adaptation of a French play reveal the internal and external challenges of bringing these characters to life
For the central character Halima — the titular ‘mother’ played by Nimra — life has quietly collapsed after her estranged son has left home, her husband has become emotionally distant, and her domestic routines have become hollow. What begins as a portrait of ‘empty-nest’ loneliness gradually becomes something more disturbing, as Halima spars with a husband who seems present and absent at the same time, and a son who seemingly appears, disappears and reappears.
Psychologically rich and formally daring, The Mother draws audiences into the protagonist’s unstable inner life by also making them feel that reality is beginning to slip. Conversations repeat, scenes contradict one another, there are fractures in the narrative and time becomes unreliable, as viewers are forced to share in Nimra’s searing portrayal of Halima’s confusion, longing, jealousy and despair. We can’t tell whether Halima is misremembering, fantasising or lying to herself, since the structure is meant to be deliberately disorienting.
What makes Zeller’s play — and Khan’s adaptation — so disturbing is that nothing ‘big’ happens for most of its running time. There is no violent eruption, no melodramatic betrayal. The final section of the play lands with a devastating clarity. There is no catharsis. There is no redemption. There is only the quiet horror of a woman realising she is no longer needed.
As a piece of theatre, The Mother is not ‘comfortable’. Its structure may frustrate some, and its refusal to explain itself may irritate others. But that is the point. The play is not designed to be ‘solved’.
To pull off a play like this requires a director with a deft hand and actors who can deliver on the rigorous material. In particular, this play hinges on its central performance.
Nimra BUCHA BACK ON STAGE
Nimra is the latest in a stacked line-up of actresses who have taken on the central part in Zeller’s The Mother, such as Catherine Hiegel, Gina McKee and Isabelle Huppert. Nimra’s visceral portrayal of a woman coming apart at the seams blends desperation, dark humour and menace. Watching the character unravel on stage, I couldn’t help but think of Gena Rowlands’ seminal performance in the John Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence.
For Nimra, the experience of stepping into the character of Halima “has been tough — to get the emotional rhythm and the volume of all this. And it’s never correct. It never feels like it’s there. But the play is nothing without all its parts. So, you need to actually go on that journey,” she tells me.
“I really found it very hard,” she continues, expanding on the challenge of playing such a part. “You attempt it. You attempt to make a connection with the emotional core. I even told Usama this once during rehearsal. I said: ‘Usama, I think I’ve not been able to find that connection with her.’”
Halima is not written as a ‘mad woman’ in any melodramatic sense. Reality fractures because her perception of it can no longer be trusted, thus leaving both her and the audience in a state of flux. I ask Nimra if there were any other films or performances that she drew on to flesh out this character.
For Nimra Bucha, the experience of stepping into the character of Halima “has been tough — to get the emotional rhythm and the volume of all this. And it’s never correct. It never feels like it’s there. But the play is nothing without all its parts. So, you need to actually go on that journey,” she tells me. “I really found it very hard,” she continues, expanding on the challenge of playing such a part. “You attempt it. You attempt to make a connection with the emotional core.”
“To be honest, we were always trying to steer clear of the usual traps,” she says. “In fact, I wrote a message to my friend saying: ‘Here I am, playing someone unhinged again.’ And she replied to me, saying: ‘Nobody wants to see hinged people!’”
The director was adamant that Nimra not play Halima as “crazy”. “Usama kept saying, ‘She is not crazy,’” Nimra recalls. “You don’t judge the character. You play her in the moment. She has a single purpose: to make sure she is not left alone. You do all sorts of things for that.”
Despite having now performed the play in front of a live audience, Nimra is well aware that she’ll discover new facets of her character and this play over the course of The Mother’s run at Napa, saying, “Tonight doesn’t feel like a culmination. Because it still feels like a process. And I think it’s that kind of play that you will always be trying to figure out.”
When I ask her what her initial impressions were after reading the Urdu version of The Mother, she says, “Sometimes when you adapt something, you lose something to gain something else. I think this was not really an adaptation. It was really a very strong translation. Which we tried to play with.”
Prior to The Mother, Nimra hadn’t done a stage play in Karachi since before the pandemic. Talking about her return to the stage, she says, “I was really scared. This is the first time this iteration of the play is being performed. The truth is, I spend most of the year hiding. I’m not the sort of person who’s confident being myself. But the theatre really does engage your muscles in a way that television or film simply don’t.”
‘PORTRAYING LIFE’
Zeller’s writing — and Usama’s translation — is deceptively simple. Scenes repeat with slight changes. Lines are recycled with different emotional weights. The audience is left to wonder: did this happen, or did she imagine it? Is this a memory, a wish or a lie? I ask the actors how technically brutal this is to execute live on stage.
Sonil Shanker, a seasoned Napa-regular who plays Halima’s husband Saad, describes it as performing multiple versions of the same person all at once: “Even if I’m repeating the same line, the objective and ideology are totally different. The crescendo at the end, when I switch — that’s tricky.”
In a performance layered with guilt, frustration and tenderness, Ashmal Lalwany, an acting graduate from Napa, plays Halima’s son Arsalan. He says, “We, as the performers, can’t be confused. Our job is to confuse the audience.”
That requires extraordinary internal clarity. The scenes often ‘repeat’, but the motivations do not. Each return is emotionally different, even when the words are the same. “It’s a play that is ‘cooked’ very slowly,” Ashmal says. “Every day is a new discovery.”
Eshah Shakeel, who plays the deliberately shape-shifting and amorphous character of Sana, describes the text as fragments of memory rather than scenes. “We would decide something and then rethink it,” she says. “We would then ask ourselves: ‘Is this her perception? Is this a fragment of reality?’ There’s a lot of room for interpretation.”
That’s exactly what appealed to the play’s director. A graduate of Napa, Usama has been thinking about staging The Mother for a while. He has previously translated and directed Zeller’s Truth and has a deep regard for the emotional architecture on display in Zeller’s plays.
“I’ve read all his plays,” he says. “After reading them, you feel something. And, after watching this play, you don’t want to talk. You just want to go home. So, for me, this is my most complicated attempt as a theatre director. You read it, and you don’t know how to execute it. You read it and don’t know what people will understand.”
I ask him how challenging it is to translate plays into Urdu, especially one like this, where so much subtext is baked into each line of dialogue. He pauses before responding: “I don’t want to come across as sounding overconfident, but I’ve translated several plays over the years, so translations are not all that hard for me anymore. The priority for me now is to finish writing the original play that I’m currently working on.”
Expanding on his underpinning philosophy as a director, Usama says, “Ultimately, as a director, I try to portray life. I don’t try to give a message. I don’t know if I’m successful in it. But I just try to portray life and then leave the audience with a question.”
One of the central questions that Usama had to solve early on was who to cast in the lead role. For him, casting Nimra was instinctive. “The first person that came to mind for this role was her,” he says. He clearly has good instincts, because Nimra’s performance is the engine of this production.
Usama’s direction is disciplined and ergonomic, much like the set itself. He resists the temptation to underline or clarify, instead choosing to trust his actors and audience. There are moments where the repetition risks dulling rather than deepening the effect. But when the play works, it operates with haunting precision, as a sort of psychological excavation.
BRINGING IT TO THE STAGE
Putting on a theatre play, let alone a psychological drama that runs for 10 days, in Karachi is not for the faint-hearted. But, for producer Haris Khan and co-producer Kiran Amin Mohammad, the delight of helping to bring theatrical experiences to audiences in Karachi is well worth the “sweat and blood” that goes into orchestrating such an undertaking.
Kiran, a former banker who is now a student at Napa, says that plays offer audiences something that other media simply can’t: “Watching a play, any play, will expand your thinking. It will make you think out of the box. It will change you as a person in a better way. And the play could be drastically murderous, or it could have a criminal as the protagonist. But it will still evolve you in some way. There is so much thrill and there’s so much adrenaline to it.”
For Haris, that adrenaline was palpable on The Mother’s opening night, during which he “wasn’t watching the play. I was watching the audience.”
But the challenges of getting a play off the ground in Karachi are stark. “When you’re starting a new thing, you’re optimistic,” Kiran says. “You think, ‘Of course I’ll be able to get sponsors and they’ll all be so receptive.’ But the reality is quite different. Everyone gave me meetings. But there were very few who actually translated that into financial support.”
Being able to seek out sources for funding and marketing are crucial skills that producers need in their toolkit, ones that Haris and Kiran feel aren’t being properly imparted to those entering this field in the country. “Go to any film or acting school in Pakistan,” Haris says, “they don’t teach you how to produce. They’re just producing creatives who don’t know how to sell their creations.”
But ultimately, for Haris and Kiran, being a producer is an act of belief, which is why they are still optimistic that Karachi will continue to see more plays that venture into challenging territory. The Mother certainly does that, thanks in no small part to Nimra’s towering performance.
In fact, as I’m wrapping up my conversation with Nimra, as if on cue, I receive a call from my mother, prompting both Nimra and me to proclaim: “How apt!”
While the obvious thing to ask Nimra would be how much of her own role as a mother she can relate to within this play, I instead ask her how much she thought of her mother while working on this production. She takes a long sigh before declaring, “Oh, all the time. It’s inevitable.”
The Mother is being performed at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa), Karachi from January 9-18, 2025
The writer is a member of staff. He can be reached at hasnain.nawab1@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, ICON, January 18th, 2026