KARACHI, March 21: Those of us who are familiar with high-quality 20th century theatre would know what the very name Dario Fo means. The Italian playwright trailed a blaze for many a dramatist through his intelligent farcical plays poking fun at the society he’s part of. ‘Accidental Death of an Anarchist’ is one of his, if not the most, commercially successful and critically acclaimed plays. The National Academy of Performing Arts’ second annual art festival began at the academy’s in-house theatre on Thursday evening with an Urdu adaptation of the Dario Fo masterpiece titled Lao To Qatl Nama Mera, directed by Farhan Alam Siddiqui.
The play tells the story of the death of an alleged terrorist who falls off the building of a police station and dies. There is a suspicion that he was pushed off the building.
When the play starts a police inspector Roshan (Sayyid Hammad Sartaj) is seen with a constable (Faraz Chhotani). A character Jaali (Shahjehan Narejo) enters. He is a semi-crazy person whom the policemen try and implicate in a case but he dodges them through his wayward answers. When the policemen leave the office, Jaali reenters the room to fetch something he had forgotten and finds it opportune to rummage through some important files. In the meantime the phone rings and he picks it up. The telephonic conversation reveals that a judge is going to come to investigate the death of the alleged terrorist. Jaali decides to doa bit of role-playing and assume the garb of the judge.
Another inspector (Hammad Khan) and an SP (Farhan Alam) along with the constable enter the office. Jaali appears as the judge and intimidates them. He asks the policemen to reenact how things had had happened and what caused that terrorist to jump off the fourth floor. The policemen try to show him their side of the story but the judge, Jaali, is too clever to get fooled by them.He instead makes them say things which implicate the policemen in the case. The SP and the inspector implore him not to delve deep into the matter.
The play moves forward and a journalist Faiza Khalili (Syeda Maha Ali) phones up the police station. It turns out that the SP hadearlier consented to give her an interview. The SP requests the judge to make himself scarce but Jaali suggests he should meet the journalist as a doctor. The journalist comes and asks searching questions of the policemen. Jaali as doctor tries to tell her that her doubts are unfounded. Faiza Khalili does not feel satisfied with their answers and is adamant that it’s not the case of a suicide because the deceased’s body had shown signs of struggle. She delivers a little spiel that the common man is always sacrificed in the name of justice to give protection to the high and mighty.
Inspector Roshan returns with a defused bomb in his hand and joins the scene. He sees Jaali and immediately recognises him.
He tells everybody that he is a crazy person but the other policemen try to keep him quiet thinking that the doctor is actually the judge. After a bit of hullabaloo Roshan exposes Jaali and takes out a gun holding everybody hostage. Tables are turned and Jaali gets hold of the bomb, which is not defused, and asks Faiza to handcuff the policemen. She does that. The lights go off and an explosion is heard. But Jaali tells the audience there is another ending to the play. The policemen handcuff the journalist and then the explosion is heard.
The play basically uncovers the shortcomings of the police department in particular and the justice system in general. It also, though not in detail, touches on how the media works. It does so using humour because of which the dim-witted attitude of the police force comes to the fore, and the crazy person Jaali becomes an effective tool in achieving that goal.
The play had some genuinely funny moments, especially when the policemen are supposed to sing a song of unity and instead belt out an Indian film number ‘Neele Neele Amber Per’. However, there was something amiss. The actor who played the part of the protagonist, Shahjehan Narejo, was constantly punching above his weight. He was painfully monotonous. Throughout the performance he spoke in a loud voice and at times sounded as if he had run out of breath.
There were occasions when in the middle of an engaging moment the actors overlapped their lines which put a dampener on the whole sequence. Still, the main culprit was the Urdu script (whose writer’s name was not mentioned by the organisers). It was fraught with clichés like the aamriat-jamhooriat debate. Whenever Jaali gave such a lecture he took the fun out of his character because the lines came across as disconnected. The script needed more contemporary meat.
Faraz Chhotani was brilliant in the constable’s role. He looked the part. Hammad Sartaj was also quite good but had the smallest part.
Given that a decent number of members of the audience laughed their heads off in a few scenes, Lao To Qatl Nama Mera could be called an okay effort.
