fter a rehearsal for another play that was going up at the Young Directors’ Festival in February of this year, Hasnain Raza leaned back on what was not an altogether comfortable seat, and gave his peers feedback on the day’s work.

“He isn’t the director of the play, but he is brilliant, so we asked him to watch us and time us,” shared Hani Taha, who was playing the lead in an adaptation of Manhoff’s The Owl And The Pussycat.

As Raza detailed where the actors had missed their marks, gone too fast, stumbled or faltered, it was clear that everyone in the room hung on to his every word. Quite a feat, for someone who is in his early 20s.

Raza spoke about his own play for the festival, Namukammal, which he had written himself, and according to him, was about the things that are unsaid, and the things that we assume.

Namukammal just finished its five-day-long reprise at NAPA last weekend, and received a standing ovation. It was a good play, but there was something missing.

The good things about Namukammal were the components of any good production. The script was sharp, the dialogues clever. The actors were really hitting their marks. The lighting was – pardon the very unintended pun – spot on. The stage was utilized beautifully, dividing the space into different areas which were then lit as needed.

The story was quite interesting for a completely fresh writer. His maturity as an artist came through his words, however, the rawness of a person who hasn’t experienced many of life’s facets came through as well.

As a rule, NAPA accepts all original submissions by students if they meet the quality checks, though a panel of advisors suggests improvements and tweaks. In Raza’s case, he was asked to shorten the play, as well as alter a scene that might have been too vague for audiences to understand.

Execution-wise, Namukammal wins every prize for being produced by a technology-aware team. NAPA has previously produced actors and directors with incredible vision – both Sunil Shankar and Fawad Khan come to mind here, for Equus and Khwab Tha Shayad, their own maiden productions – but limited resources to do exactly what they wanted to, perhaps. While Shankar used sound and music as a very alive part of his productions, Khan tended to inch into surrealism, managing to pull it off for the most part, but not entirely.

However, these are the people who have informed and trained the sensibilities of students graduating now, and are more likely to be open to experimentation and using the tools available to us to sketch out scenes more realistically.

Theater had become a sizeable, if not huge, part of Pakistan’s entertainment industry in the last decade and a half. It started offering variety, with everything from an elaborate musical by Nida Butt’s Made For Stage Productions, to Shah Sharahbeel’s song and dance extravaganzas, to KopyKat’s very original plays, often penned by Anwar Maqsood; to yes, NAPA’s “proper theater” plays.

The institution often invited criticism for its highbrow approach to the medium, in a country that is more often than not starved for entertainment, but is assumed to have a hit a particular intellectual peak which cannot be leapt across, apparently.

Perception is everything, and audiences at large, if at all familiar with NAPA, will assume the work coming out of the institution would be dull, too serious, and not fun. While a NAPA play cannot compete in terms of sales and marketability, to, say, a Grease or Pawnay 14 August, it would be fair to say that the latter productions might not be able to hold a candle to the quality of content and creative execution of a NAPA play. To put it simply, the different schools of theatric thought in Pakistan are simply not comparable.

However, over the years it has become apparent that lesser actors gain better commercial projects while NAPA students and alumni are relegated to smaller roles, or no roles. An interesting thing to note here would be how after the performance of one very successful series of plays in Karachi, the director noted that he had to beat the diction and mannerism of his one NAPA-trained actor out before he was allowed on stage. When in conversation with television/film actors, the most common phrase whenever NAPA actors are brought up is, ‘jo dikhta hai wo bikta hai,’ dismissing every product of the institute as a commercial failure.

When Fawad Khan, actor, director, NAPA alum, and current Artistic Director of NAPA Repertory Theater, discusses the misconceptions surrounding NAPA and its work, he is stumped; which incidentally is also the name of a play Khan points to as one of the more modern, original works performed by NAPA actors.

“When you say, ‘classical approach’, do you mean classical texts, or classical execution, because they are two very different things,” says Khan. “And I would like to point out that if we put up a Shakespearean play, we will also perform a Stumped! (original by Imran Yusuf) or a Faraib (adapted from Harold Pinter’s Betrayal).”

Within the context of this conversation, Khan also points out that Equus and Khwab Tha Shayad were performed 10 years ago, and NAPA has done a lot more since then.

The point here to make would be that their reputation precedes them, which is why you might not be tempted to view Waiting For Godot, adapted to Sindhi, on what is supposed to be a fun Saturday night, but if you did, you would be pleasantly surprised by the humour and sensitivity that comes across despite a language barrier.

“We are a performing arts institution, and yes, our focus is on one particular medium,” says Khan, “but we are also training our students in screen acting, in a course taught by Yamina Peerzada.

Khan is chewing on the thought that some mainstream television actors have commented on how NAPA actors are unable to handle screen acting. “There are so many people who have come out of NAPA to do incredible things,” he says, “Saqib Khan has directed Ghabrana Nahi Hai (released recently), Paras Masroor has been on television for quite a few years (Parizaad and Dhoop Ki Dewar), Nabeel Qureshi spent two years here; you do see NAPA alumni making their mark.”

The difference between a commercial success and pure acting genius is unfortunately as small as a unibrow. Whether we like it or not, we are looking at things a lot more, and a lot more critically than before, and have a vast range of visual comparison for just about anything from banana bread to dogs to people.

Fawad Khan believes that this lookist culture is to the detriment of the artist.

“Maybe the world should stop being about surface beauty,” he says. “Being presentable is one thing and being all about looks is another. As an actor, ideally, I would like to be cast in a range of characters. The more flexible one is with the look [required] the more chances there are that you won’t be typecast.”

Every year, art and design schools invite members from the advertising and fine art industries to critique students’ final presentations, which is how many future stars are discovered. A similar marriage between entertainment media and NAPA would be mutually beneficial to both.

Actors and directors graduating from the institution should be assured they will find work in their field, based on merit, of course, while production houses and TV channels will find themselves at an advantage if they conduct auditions on-campus.