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Bill Manhoff, the American playwright, must be turning in his grave. He must be crying out in agony. At the very least, he must be somewhat grateful at not having lived to see the Karachi Arts Council’s latest adaptation of his play ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, under the helm of Napa graduate Fawad Khan, who mounted a recent production of it from June 17 to 20 in Karachi.

The play begins with Chandramukhi, a sex worker, storming into the London apartment of Fred Solomon, an aspiring writer, in the middle of the night. She announces that she will camp there for the night because her landlord has evicted her.

Solomon is not open to this possibility, to say the least. He is snobby, elitist, and particular. He has binoculars and as it happens, has been spying on Chandramukhi. In fact, earlier that day, Solomon himself had reported her to her landlord for immoral activities. Thus begins the battle, supposedly of wits, between an unconvincingly feisty sex worker and a self-proclaimed writer who struggles for groundbreaking ideas and wrestles with self-constructed but uninspiring phrases such as ‘the sun spit morning…’ Sure, Manhoff’s controversial play, based on his relationship with his wife Margaret McLaughlin, attracted some criticism upon reception due to its subject matter, which is not the same thing as the criticism drawn by this play, for its poor direction and lacklustre performances.

Fizza Zehra is, in a word, miscast. She was more convincing in last year’s ‘Odd Couple’, though she still seems to lack the necessary presence, in particular, the voice projection required for a truly satisfying performance. Joining her onscreen was the director, who appears to have taken on too much. This could, to be fair, be symptomatic of the credit crunch on theatrical productions, whereby the producer cannot afford to take on professional actors and must make do in less than ideal circumstances. Otherwise, a slew of Napa grads — Saqib Khan, Mohsin Ali, Ali Sheikh, for example – could have done a much better job.

All good playwrights have a message to their narrative behind the mere words and actions. In a bid to carry it forward, the directors interpret or take on what lies deep within the script. At the heart of this play, Manhoff appears to question the self-sufficiency of the intellectual. Through Solomon, his male protagonist, he makes a case for not being able to live a life of the mind alone, denying oneself the simple joys of life. Reason without feeling tends to arrive at conclusions that do not necessarily reflect reality, a gap exists between the thinking and feeling mind, “Even with fantasies, and dirty words and the guilty stink of the sewer you can only sometimes whip yourself into a parody of passion.” This lies at the heart of the play, but is not drawn out at any point in this production, which is a shame since it’s a message worth putting out. It deserves a more skilful execution than this.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2010.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/23483/the-really-odd-couple

Four men sitting in the middle of a green field that has patches of barren land, busy in a discussion, thinking what issue should they base their play on — which they are going to stage in a few minutes. It is a weekly, Friday routine.

In a nearby mosque named after Baitullah Mehsud, the Asr prayers have just been offered and around 200 men, old and young, with numerous children — apparently from religious seminaries, are now leaving the mosque and heading out to an open corner of this space is a heap of garbage while the other is used by children as playground. For the locals, it’s time to enjoy; for they are going to witness the performance of Muhammadzada Dilshad and his fellow actors.

Muzaffarabad Colony is a slum located in a far-off corner of Quaidabad in Karachi. Its population is around 3,000 composed of different ethnicities. However, Pashtuns are in majority here; Muhammadzada, the scrape-vendor and a passionate actor, is one of them.

Born in Karachi some forty years back (he doesn’t remember his date of birth), Muhammadzada’s family hailed from Swat to the ‘city of lights’ in 1966. Since then he’s been living in this very slum, a two-room house, with six children to feed. Poverty has taken a great toll on him.

Three decades ago, Pushto movies had a good market in Karachi. They were released in cinema screens quite regularly and got a good response from the Pushto-speaking filmgoers. Muhammadzada was one of them. He was always fascinated by movies and dreamt of becoming an actor. So he started looking for avenues to explore his talent. All in vain, because he neither had school education nor proper guidance to make his dream come true. Later, he got married and now has six children and one grandchild.

In his teens, he had joined a street-theatre group of local amateur actors, headed by a local celebrity Syed Ali Shah, famously known as Syed Bacha, who used to arrange similar gatherings for his people just for fun in the same vicinity. Syed Bacha also performed in other Pushtoon colonies in Karachi, including Banaras and Sohrab Goth. He later gave up his passion for acting when he was going to Lahore to do a small act in a movie in 1989 upon the insistence of his mother. He promised her that he wouldn’t act anymore. She died later, but he has kept his promise to date.

Muhammadzada was his disciple. He recruited fresh talent and started doing street theatre in the early nineties. He’s kept his passion alive while putting his act before his audiences every week for the past 18 years.

In his journey, he faced many difficulties besides poverty. One of them is resistance from local clerics. In fact, they invoked public sentiments against him and even tried to stop him, for they believed his plays were unethical and too provocative for the young minds of the colony. But Muhammadzada fought the odds, eventually having his way.

Of his Friday theatrical adventures, Muhammadzada says: “I love it. It’s fun and helps people laugh, think and relax. We talk about social issues, such as domestic violence, injustice, family problems, corruption, lack of education and, most of all, the problems our poor people face in their daily life.”

When asked how his acts affect his audiences, he says, “There have been instances when somebody in the audience got carried away and started cursing me. Once I was playing a character who beats his wife. The women in the audience didn’t like it and slapped me. We stopped the proceedings and, later, and tried to make them understand that it’s just acting.” He admits that it was rare of women to attend his plays, because of tribal customs.

But Muhammadzada has no regrets. He says he has enjoyed his life, no matter how difficult it has been so far. “On another occasion, an old man in beard shouted at my fellow actor because the latter threw his father out of his house in a play. It was about how sometimes boys treat their parents who are getting old. It was a panicky situation.”

Muhammahzada runs his own theatre group with four actors, one storywriter, and no aid from anyone. His group members include Ameer Naushad (45), Shahid Zaman (30) and Akber Khan (38).

One of his fellow actors Muhammad Fayyaz Pardesi, a 17-year old innocent-looking boy — is asked to play the female characters, because Muhammadzada cannot recruit women to do the job.

Another member of Muhammadzada’s group, Shahid Zaman, a mason by profession, does the job of visualising. He takes up a social issue and a story around it. His inspiration is Pushto and Urdu movies. His themes are not complexly theatrical and lack a climax a theatre academic or a critic would look for in a play. Muhamamdzada doesn’t have resources for props, costumes or stage, but he manages to get four to five hundred attendants every week.

Published in The News International, January 03^rd, 2010.
https://jang.com.pk/thenews/jan2010-weekly/nos-03-01-2010/enc.htm#4

Paris serves a great deal for tourists, lovers and artists across the world. It is a vibrant city of a culture known for perfumes, arrogance, monuments, wines and romance. But there is something else which is taking place there in the shape of a sorry reality: the phenomenon of poor illegal migrants.
Prominent of this lot that you happen to come across right outside Gare du Nord are South Asians, who made their way to the Continent for better economic conditions and a happy future, only visualized in fairytales. They are not proud salesmen or dishwashers. Instead, they are beggars and barely live a life less privileged than our homegrown
beggar mafia. Sometimes, they even lack a room to live or a tram ticket to travel. The roadsides and pathways of this cultured city serve them well in cold, more cold and bitter cold seasons. The temperature is minus something these days, isn’t it?

So what is it that the French authorities do when they find out about such unwelcome creatures on their soil? A wagon-driver from Rawalpindi and now an illegal migrant Muhammad Bashir told me his story in a long-spell of an October night. “They cannot do anything practically, for they can neither get us jobs nor send us back. The law enforcing authorities mean business here. That’s why we can’t get jobs without legal papers. We don’t have our passports, because the agents in Pakistan took them from us when we came here. Now we are mourning over our sad situation and depend on the daily meals we get from a charity run by a nearby-located church.” Bashir is living, of course on the sideways, for past four years. He barged into Europe about seven years ago via Iran to Turkey to Greece. Since then, he claims, he is unemployed. Paris is his home for past four years.

Bashir has forgotten to speak his native language. He’s taught himself to speak in a sign language he has designed for his convenience and begging for a living. He greeted me
with affection, offered me a puff, and asked me to sit by him. Fond of current affairs and political analyses, he was a fan of Hamid Mir’s columns. While exchanging views on the state of affairs in Pakistan, he unrolled a month-old Urdu newspaper and tried to read an article for me. A fine reader, indeed!

But he couldn’t speak Urdu for a conversation. He was not mute. Instead he spoke a few words of English. For instance when he told me about his journey (from Pindi to Paris) he would get up, take a position and do the round of acting rather than talking about it. It stumped me with the fact he was extremely disturbed psychologically. He needed a
doctor (so I felt) and a few hundred euros (so he told) to get his passport anew, to fly back home. His wife and children are waiting for him, he said.

There were other Bashirs around as well across the sinuous landscape of Paris. A large number, mostly young, turned out to be vendors roaming around Eiffel Tower and de
Louve. They are new to this land and know the tricks of escaping in case the policemen come to catch them. Some of them were Africans and Indians, who managed to transport
themselves here by paying thousands of dollars. The human trafficking is on the rise, one of them said. It seems the Gujrat to Greece mafia is doing great business these days, I remarked.

On my dream journey to this carnival city accompanied a dear friend and fellow-traveler Fabian Pianka, whose an upper-middle class German by birth and a French by heart. His
eye for beauty and horror is quite unparallel, just like Parisians. His appreciation for human intelligence and achievements lies in his knowledge of Paris, precisely because he views all things French as inescapable and invincible for all romantics. But I found it interesting that he couldn’t find a way to escape from his usual argument when poverty unleashed itself on the alleys of this city of love. “You will even find French poor toiling on the streets. The state wants to take care of them, but they arrogantly refuse,” says Fabian, pointing at a beggar lying in a corner. I took his answer for truth which, I suppose, was based on his five-year life in Paris. I wonder if Muhammad Bashir would dare refuse if he was offered a job or unemployment aid. Probably, he lacks the guts to be
a French.

Published in TNS, The News International, in December, 2009.

Art and activism have often been a point of both controversy and discussion among left-leaning individuals since Renaissance. Artists accused activists of mere sloganeering and bondage to strict ideology; activists alleged artists of often falling into the trap of sheer individualism and consequently, betraying their shared dream of human freedom. The fight over who’s right on the Left has been on since then, but no one has responded to it more significantly than Dario Fo – an Italian by birth and a Marxist by choice.

Fo says: “Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.” And so does he do in his plays. He mixes ideology with art, spices it up with humour, presents it in a cultural frame, and finally provokes his audiences to get active or, at least, think. And this is exactly what one of Fo’s fans, Rahat Kazmi, has done with an adaptation of Fo’s play, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! Theadaptation is titled ‘Jungle Main Mangal Bazaar’ and is currently being staged by the Napa Repertory Theatre Company (NRTC) at the Arts Council Theatre till December 21st.

The play begins with a social paradox about what may happen if inflation forces the working and middle classes to openly steal the day-to-day articles from utility stores. And since, to a common man, there seems to be no way out of the current economic crisis, Fo’s allegory happens in reality. But is this the right way? Well, Fo has a alternate answer to it all together.

Fo, and so does Mr. Kazmi, suggest for a revolution of the people, by the people, and for the people. Their call is to radically eradicate, or rather work out, the problems faced by the society and state at large. Hell, so does say Karl Marx!

To push the Marxist envelope, Fo provokes his audiences to look at the elaborations of the German old man one last time if his analysis can work out for the better of the world. And then one begins to wonder if Marx was really right when he claimed that “all human history is the history of class struggle.”

I certainly don’t mean to deny Marx’s statement. But my sense of amazement gets a green signal when I look around and see my own people, my culture and the very class I belong to. Marx does seem to me wrong, as I don’t find a struggle here, let alone a class struggle. However my mind propels to go round in circles and I fail to find a reason for not having a struggle at all, when all the ingredients required are available. To name a few, I dare say, are political bankruptcy, rising inflation, corrupt bureaucracy, workers’ downsizing, war on terror, stagnated social morality and so on so forth.

But, one may ask, when will people rise up? When will they change what needs to be changed? Fo answers: someday, one day. Nevertheless he gives a moral push to his audiences, as one of his characters says that “our inactiveness is not the solution to anything (aforementioned)”. He is right. Take for example, inflation. It has interestingly become a shared topic among us citizens of both negligence and day-to-day talk, like it was in Italy when Fo wrote this well-crafted political comedy back in the 70`s.

Fo cries out for a revolutionary change in his dramatic work, which employs comedic methods of the ancient Italian Commedia dell’ Arte – a theatrical style popular with the proletarian class. Like most of his plays, this onehas a clown who creates an effect of silliness on stage and does his tricks to entertain the audiences. In the meantime, he tries to infuse in viewers what is religiously known as the socialist poison.

Following Fo’s method in this play, Mr. Kazmi has created a localized clown who is a police inspector, an investigator with socialist ideas, a casket-maker and an old father. With his clownish habits, this character, or rather characters, is the focus of the play. However, he is traditionally and technically not the protagonist. But his existence on stage makes him what may be called the Fo factor.

For example Mr. Kazmi’s clown, which is played by Salman Shahid, changes tone, gestures, get-ups in a jiff and mimes out bold issues, such as the process of pregnancy and baby transplantation. Not being afraid of elaborating what is considered a common secret among eastern women, Mr. Kazmi – being the director of the play – exposes boldly our social state of affairs quite like a game of magic on stage.

As the chronic disease of indifference in people over socio-political affairs lingers at large outside the theatre hall, this piece of art seems to give its audiences a radical way to look at what our situation is and what sort of social activism is required to make this world a better place for the poor, and not anymore for the rich this time.
Published in The News International (Op-Ed), in December, 2008.