KARACHI: Last year, one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful films was Hamnet. (It is tipped to do well at this year’s Oscars.) The film is based on a novel which is about William Shakespeare and his wife — his personal life. Another film Hamlet, a modern version of the Shakespearean tragedy, starring Riz Ahmed, has just been released in the UK. This goes to show the influence that Shakespeare, the playwright and poet, wields in the world of art even more than four centuries after his death.

A reworking of Shakespeare’s tragedies titled Crown of Ashes adapted into Urdu and directed by Zarqa Naz was presented at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) on Friday evening.

The show carried scenes, truncated one might add, from six plays: Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Othello, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet.

It all begins with Act 1 of Hamlet where the sighting of the murdered king of Denmark’s ghost is being discussed. Then the story shifts to a scene from Macbeth. It becomes evident from those two scenes that the set will remain the same and the actors, wearing contemporary clothes — suits and all — will make their entries and exits.

Crown of Ashes staged at Napa

There’s a raised plus-shaped stage against the backdrop of two large drapes with red shades (a sign of ominous happenings) on which actors mostly say their lines. As a result, the audience sees switches from Iago poising Othello’s ear about the latter’s wife, Desdemona, to a speech from King Lear to the extremely popular ‘O Romeo Romeo wherefore art thou’ in not a long stretch of time. And this is where the problem lies.

Shakespeare’s men and women, especially those who form his tragedies, are complex, fallible characters. He builds them in such a way that their fallibility becomes an engaging enigma. Just like one needs some time to understand, or get used to, a human being, his characters don’t make an impact in a jiffy. Therefore, he introduces techniques such as soliloquies and dream sequences. By shifting from one scene of a play to another of an entirely different drama in quick succession demands a bit of context.

This is the reason that on Friday, one found it hard to detect the tonal difference between a Romeo and a Hamlet. Naz — who is a fine and reliable theatre person — does try and create a thematic unity in the stitched-together story, for which she must be appreciated; it’s the actors who struggle to find their rhythm.

The cast of Crown of Ashes was: Ahad Touqeer, Aqsa Ayub, Hammad Khan, Iqra Ayub, Jahanzaib Naviwala, Rachna Kirpalani, Sam­han Ghazi and Zulfiqar Ghouri.

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2026