A well-paced romp that combines biting satire with slapstick humour, the play is worth watching because in times like these, who doesn’t need a laugh? Even better, the script gives us an opportunity to laugh at the very times in which we live.
Based on work by the Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright Dario Fo, “Jangal Mai Mangal Bazaar” takes a humorous look at inflation and its social consequences. Shela and Kiran – played by Uroosa Shamim and Aiman Tariq, respectively – are housewives driven to stealing groceries owing to a financial pinch. Their attempts to hide their misdemeanour from their earnest and, for the most part, honest husbands drive the comedy of the play.
Kazmi explains that he was attracted to Fo’s work because it combines the comedic methods of the ancient Italian comedia dell’arte with the classical structure of Greek drama, thereby creating a new form in which a clown is the central focus of the narrative. In “Jangal Mai Mangal Bazaar”, that clown figure is wonderfully rendered by Shahid, who dominates the performance playing four roles.
In his first appearance as a jaded policeman investigating the housewives’ theft, Shahid dominates the show. His rapid-fire delivery and off-colour quips create a perfect caricature of authority. During his roundabout exchanges with Shela’s husband Umair (played by Muhammad Saqib), the policeman reveals the arbitrary nature and absurdity of law enforcement, drawing an uncanny parallel to real life. Indeed, peppered with subtle sarcasm about policemen and their investigation techniques, these exchanges comprise the satirical core of the play.
Shahid’s subsequent appearances disguised as a policeman who is tricked by the housewives into thinking he’s blind shows off the actor’s range, and Kazmi’s directorial prowess. The hyperbolic re-enactment of an old curse by the housewives includes well-timed slapstick comedy, humorous blocking, an ad hoc qawwali, and a clutter of vegetables. Instead of seeming haphazard and hokey, these elements combine to make for the funniest sequence in the play.
In his other roles as a coffin-bearer and Umair’s aged father Daddy Abu, Shahid is competent, but cannot compete with his earlier performances. At times he reverts to familiar stereotypes of a labourer and tottering old man. Still, Shahid’s flair for physical comedy carries this play on its shoulders.
Thankfully, the other actors, all members of Napa’s Repertory Company, more than hold their own while sharing a stage with Shahid. Shamim is particularly effective in the role of Shela, expressing both the weariness of a housewife making ends meet and the comic craftiness of a woman concealing a crime from her husband and the police. Indeed, in the scene where the housewives trick the policeman, Shamim and Tariq arguably outshine Shahid.
As Shela’s husband, Saqib successfully manages to seem hapless, first in the face of his wife’s deception, and later, as he stumbles along his own path to hopelessness. Mohsin Ali Shah in the role of Kiran’s husband Daniyal completes the strong cast. In the daunting task of making Karachiites laugh, the actors are well supported by the language of the play, adapted into Urdu by Napa student Babar Jamal. Colloquial and contemporary, the script successfully localises Fo’s work and pokes fun at all that ails middle-class Karachiites: soaring prices, bumbling policemen, load-shedding, domestic squabbles, misplaced superstitions. More importantly, the play’s razor-sharp political jibes had the audience chuckling knowingly.
The set, as much as the characters’ situation, also locates the play. The action unfolds in a rendition of a middle-class flat complete with cane furniture and a view of the congested urban skyline. The set was perhaps too sparse and uninnovative, especially when compared to the backdrops of previous Napa performances. On the other hand, convincing details such as a crashed Suzuki pickup jazz up interspersed street scenes.
Ultimately, the play stands out because it allows us to laugh at women’s issues. The trials of everyday Pakistani women have been featured on the local stage, but rarely in a way that lends itself to comic relief. Here, as the housewives conceal their theft by faking pregnancies, audience’s will find themselves giggling at everything from grocery shopping to premature birth, old wives tales to labour pangs, illegitimate children and more. The irony is compounded by the fact that one of the characters is in fact infertile. In this context, “Jangal Mai Mangal Bazaar” is as refreshing as it is timely.