Back-to-back comedies amuse audience at Pakistan Theatre Festival

The Pakistan Theatre Festival treated the audience to a laughter fest on Sunday by staging two comedies. The first one was ‘Gadha Mandi’, which was a short play that ended in an hour. The other one, ‘Dinner with Darling’, spanned around two hours.

The director, Owais Rehan, and most of the cast members of the first play were fresh graduates of the Arts Council of Pakistan (ACP) Theatre Academy.

The only experienced actor was Farhan Alam Siddiqui, who played the role of a swindler who meets poetic justice in the end as he turns into a donkey. The other actors included Farhan Rahim, Aqsa Gull, Hassam Irfan and Adil Shakir.

Labelled a political satire by the ACP, the play was in fact more of a light comedy for children, in which a cunning man steals a donkey from a farmer and replaces the animal with his friend, who convinces the farmer that he was his donkey who had turned into a human being.

The play ended sooner than expected. The swindler, played by Siddiqui, finds a magic book and he comes to the farmer’s house to make him and his wife donkeys through magic. However, the spell does not work properly, and as he casts it repeatedly, he eventually turns himself into a donkey.

This last scene was the funniest, with the stage getting dark for a brief moment every time the spell was cast, and when the lights were back on again, some of the actors could be heard braying with a donkey mask on their faces.

The director told The News that the play was an Urdu adaptation of a play by Egyptian writer Taufiq ul Hakim. He said that the original play was even shorter in length, and that they had added more dialogues in it.

Roller coaster of laughter

The other play, Dinner with Darling, was not for children, since it was about a couple cheating on each other and who end up having their lovers in the house.

As both the husband and the wife do not want the other to know the truth of their affairs, they weave a web of lies and arrange a dinner party for their guests. However, the person who gets the most entangled in that web of deception is the innocent chef who has been called to prepare the dinner.

As things get crazy and more lies have to be told to cover the earlier ones, the husband’s paramour has to assume the role of the cook in order to escape the wife’s suspicion. Meanwhile, the chef has to play one role after another as the situation changes.

Since the play’s writer Babar Jamal, director Uzma Sabeen and actors are known theatre practitioners, people had high expectations from the play, and those expectations were met, for it was a roller coaster of laughter.

The star of the play was Zarqa Naz, who played the role of the chef. She entered the house as an Eastern woman with shalwar kameez and dupatta.

However, at the end she was wearing the attire of a model ready for the catwalk. Her mannerism and how she badly acted all the roles she had to assume during the play made everyone laugh. The other cast members were Farhan Alam Siddiqui, Momina, Rachna Kirpalani, Owais Mubashir and Usman Ranjha.

The festival will continue on Monday (today) with veteran actor Rehan Sheikh’s dramatic rendition of ‘Chandravati’, a chapter from the late writer and civil servant Qudrat Ullah Shahab’s autobiography ‘Shahabnama’.