On the subject of original theatrical writings or productions in Pakistan, much like the trajectory the country has followed in too many other spheres, the story is one of misplaced priorities and chances missed.

Consider, first, that with the benefit of the hindsight from which the progression of events can be viewed today, there was a time when it appeared that theatre could become not just a mainstay of popular entertainment, it even showed signs of developing into a medium, through which the historical burden, ideological legacy and politics of the day -- and its future trajectories -- could be discussed through an accessible popular culture. The potential was nothing less than transformative.

That this door once stood open for a brief time is important.

Notwithstanding the long tradition of theatre that existed in the subcontinent prior to Partition, Pakistan as a country emerged with a somewhat fractured inheritance. The left-leaning Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) of colonial India had its roots in the Communist Party of India and much of the membership did not find its way into the nascent nation. Even so, during the 1950s and ’60s, as a result of largely institutions such as the Government College Lahore and Kinnaird College Lahore and the arts councils in Lahore and Karachi, the so-called ‘drawing room theatre’ managed to establish itself and find a space in popular imagination.

The scripts in this case were largely adaptations or translations of well-known western -- sometimes left-leaning or Marxist -- plays such as those of Bertolt Brecht. These, particularly given political realities of Pakistan, notably the military disruptions of the process of democratic, civilian rule, found fair traction among the limited audiences before which they were then presented.

The 1970s were the decade of real growth in theatre. The mushrooming of arts councils, the establishment of a ministry for culture led to some investment in the arts. But it was the politics of the era as well as the training gained in the earlier decade that inspired new and original works to be written. Sarmad Sehbai and Shahid Nadeem both wrote their first plays in the early 1970s.

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The changing urban middle-class of the 1970s brought a whole new group of people to the theatre as well. These were people who were not from the ‘elite’ but from the middle-class, and included writers like Kamal Ahmed Rizvi, Ather Shah Khan, Sajjad Haidar, M. Sharif and Khalid Abbas Dar.

The rupture, unfortunately, occurred at the same time as when theatre finally became a potentially economically viable field of work in Pakistan -- as opposed to the enthusiast/activist inspired area it had been earlier.

Roughly, 1970s onwards, and regardless of the political machinations that were also under way, several factors led to a burgeoning of the middle-class in the country. On the one hand, accelerated urbanisation was blurring hitherto well-etched lines of social elites and creating a more varied urban milieu. On the other, the country’s economic circumstances and the beginnings of a consumer culture were such that these millions not just had money but their sense of prosperity was such that they were inclined towards spending it. Among other matter, this translated into the urban millions’ interest in and desire for access to modes of cultural production.

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In hindsight, it is easy to see where Pakistan went wrong. What ought to have occurred at this juncture was the considered promotion of quality performance --based on theatrical work through incentives and investment channelled through the government-run arts councils that already existed in several cities.

Some planning and vision at this time of Pakistani theatre’s history could have brought the ‘drawing room theatre’ and its producers into the focus of new audiences, which now existed in the urban areas in numbers that would earlier have been unimaginable. Similarly, writers and intellectuals could have been encouraged to explore the theatrical script, to say nothing of drawing in well-educated and idealistic young people.

However, the policies of the 1980s undid all the gains of the 1970s, shut down all the avenues for intellectual growth through a very repressive martial law.

The repressive strategy by the state resulted in theatre as a field being split into two streams. The drawing room theatre and its practitioners morphed into the so-called parallel theatre, similarly marginalised but using the medium as a platform for agitation and education against the dictatorship of Gen Zia.

Meanwhile, the citizenry’s desire for nodes of cultural production led, in theatre, to the so-called ‘commercial theatre’ - a bowdlerised version of performance that was little more than stand-up comedy, often scripted no further than a broad situation sketch and a series of one-liners, within which the actors situated themselves as they thought fit.

The commercial theatre enjoyed high attendances, cumulatively comprising perhaps an entire section of urban population. These numbers (ticket sales and demand) meant that the field quickly became lucrative, a viable profession for a would-be artist. And this in turn meant that talent that might have gone towards producing/writing original theatrical work of intellectual value, was instead sucked into the stand-up comedy pattern that became very rapidly entrenched because of the sheer volume of demand.

There was little original work in both strands with most of the parallel theatre based on adaptations of western plays while the commercial theatre re-hashing the same jokes in slightly different settings. The combined energy of the two strands may have had the energy to create a truly creative, representative and original Pakistani theatre but that was not meant to be.

At this juncture, when theatre was opening up into a viable field, if audiences had access to theatre of quality, would they still have chosen the commercial theatre pattern? Might their palate quickly have learned to reject intellectual poverty? By now, this is perhaps an academic point for historians to argue over.

Looking back, it can be said that it was at this moment that Pakistan missed the boat for originality and quality in theatre, with other opportunities long in the coming. By the mid-1990s, the opening up of the television sector and some stirring in cinema meant that ideas, along with writers, directors, producers and actors, chose other paths. Theatre remained deeply divided. The elites had their theatre of resistance, or, in later years, high-end productions of global success such as The Phantom of the Opera or Chicago  -- exciting, but hardly original. The masses, meanwhile, had icons such as Amanullah, Albela, and Babboo Baral hugely popular, but not the stuff of which an independent theatre tradition is born.

And so, the question that continues to haunt: how might it have been different if the split had not happened? What might even a single visionary have produced?