ast week, Olomopolo Media presented a “double bill” of theatre plays written by Bee Gul. The play Marnay Say Pehlay Jannat was performed first; Bedroom Conversations following shortly. The former was shown in the courtyard of Olo Junction, as the audience were led through a narrow back way; the latter was staged in a cramped indoor hall.

The dimly lit ambience, cushions as seats on both sides of the stage, and the levitating, stained glass doorframe leading to the courtyard conjured a surrealistic magic, as if straight from Alice in Wonderland. Production design in both plays was immaculately done by Olomopolo’s Kanwal Khoosat.

Khalid Ahmed and Bakhtawar Mazhar starred in Marnay Say Pehlay Jannat, playing the ailing, wealthy patriarch Abba Jee and the overbearing, eponymous servant Jannat, respectively. The play is set in Abba Jee’s sickroom, where he remains following a stroke. There are clear signs of neglect: syrup bottles clutter the bed-stands, Jannat is wary of entering the room of the impolite patriarch who is often left shouting out for help, reiterating that the kothi belongs to him.

Abba Jee and Jannat both grapple with circular conflicts on a day-to-day basis. Abba Jee is made impudent and short-tempered by his family’s ignorance (his daughter-in-law, Aapa’s voice floats into the alleyway to Jannat now and then, but she is never in the room). Jannat is run ragged by poverty and her deadbeat husband who has married another woman. The solution for both of them is plain: a marriage.

Abba Jee repeatedly asks Jannat why she wears a sari, relenting only when she launches into tirades about her mother’s favoured choice of clothing. Jannat’s character inexplicably leads back to an aangan, a courtyard, much like the one the audience reside in, with a neem ka darakht. Jannat is pathologically obsessed with the kothiyan in the neighbourhood, often sneaking into a peeli kothi. The simple, homely vision she’s chased all her life, of a tree in a corner in a patch of land wholly her own, eventually leads her to relent to Abba Jee’s proposal.

The characters are self-aware even in their delusions: Jannat does not want to believe that a marriage will be as easy as Abba Jee claims. Abba Jee has no misgivings about love or devotion (“Maan kay paon talay Jannat, aur baap kay paon talay jaedaad,” he comments).

The sectioning of the stage is essential to the play’s thematic concerns: airy, translucent fabric drapes from Abba Jee’s bed and the boundaries of the room. The space becomes intimate as Jannat brushes Abba Jee’s hair, becoming the only one unafraid to touch him. The spaces she occupies deter his family by blood. The breached, immaterial walls of the room represent the porous boundaries through which Aapa’s voice perforates and rings. The walls cannot keep out society’s moral compass, and Abba Jee succumbs to a stroke in an anticlimactic end as Jannat rushes to bring the maulvi to recite the marriage vows.

Bedroom Conversations followed after a short hiatus, with noted TV and film actor Sanam Saeed and fresh-from-Joyland Ali Junejo playing the characters of nine couples.

This play is a piercing snapshot of couples in intimacy: midnight bickering beneath a whirring fan; looks while one spouse dresses for the day; and conversations at the breakfast table. The couples presented are diverse, covering several socio-economic circles and ages. There’s the woman who refuses to have children; the wife who yearns to have the opportunity to be more successful than her husband; and the mistress who confronts her runaway beloved in a hotel room. Each couple has a harrowing tale at the heart of their conflict. The complete picture is revealed at the end.

From the start, the audience can sense that the couples in Bedroom Conversations are doomed: the play presents character-driven conflicts. Even as Amna and Yousaf try to resolve their differing views on children through marriage therapy, and Naddo simultaneously maligns and beseeches her beloved in a “mamooli sa guesthouse,” there is a sense of finality. These characters are fated to repeat the same mistakes, the same dance. Love, even if it is there, cannot move them to change for their spouse.

The stage set here differs entirely from Marnay Say Pehlay Jannat but is equally effective in bolstering the theme of the play. A bed sits in the middle of the room, with dressing tables, hanging stands and bathroom sinks at opposite ends. A mirror hangs slanted from the ceiling — the audience have an eagle’s eye-view of every gesture and look, often things the couple cannot see.

The narrative is rather hurried because of its convoluted, overlapping storylines that crescendo towards the end. Each subplot converges into the other with shrinking intervals, the audience metaphorically and literally stand witness as time slips away. Props become integral as a husband’s shawl turns into a woman’s dupatta, and lights dim to signal a change in setting. Saeed and Junejo do justice to a host of characters, completely changing profiles as a wife from posh Lahore becomes an ailing grandmother dusting her shaadi ki sari and an embittered husband transforms into a good-natured, teasing lover.

Marnay Say Pehlay Jannat and Bedroom Conversations both take place in the singular, specific setting of a bedroom and star two actors each. Also, both the plays exhibit characters that show circularity in their passions and conflicts; and explore the ideas of love and marriage in the social fabric of Lahore while indicting conformative traditions. If the bedroom of the first play is demarcated by flowing muslin, the bedrooms in the second play are morphing creatures themselves.

The director of both plays, and Abba Jee’s actor, Khalid Ahmed said a few words towards the end. He said he believed that theatre — he calls it khel — is diminished to exceedingly limited circles in today’s time and age. Original plays written in Urdu, such as Marnay Say Pehlay Jannat, are few and far between, adaptations being more popular. The moving theatre productions convince the audience that Lahore is poorer for lack of more Urdu theatre.

The writer is an interdisciplinary student of literature and sciences at Lahore College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at fajr.rauf5@gmail com