Napa dream cast returns triumphant from India

Napa graduates performed "Khwabon kay Musafir” at the 13th Bharat Rang Mohatsav in New Delhi

KARACHI: The visas were delayed, the parrot in the play was fake and one of the crew members was fired from another play he was acting in - but the graduates of the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) have returned from India, triumphant and ecstatic.

The Napa students reached Karachi on January 25, after performing at the 13th Bharat Rang Mohatsav, an annual theatre festival organised by the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi. The troupe was initially supposed to perform on January 14 at the LTG auditorium in New Delhi but because of visas, their trip was delayed and they only just made it to India in time for the last day of the festival.

They performed the popular Pakistani play, “Khwabon kay Musafir” on January 22. The play was written by the famous Urdu writer, Intezaar Hussain, and was directed  by Napa Chairman Zia Mohyeddin. The crew was taken to India under the guidance of Rahat Kazmi, artistic director of the Napa Repertory Company.

Akbar Islam, who was the assistant director of the play and part of the cast, appreciated the Indians’ professionalism. “We had very little time and we had no set designer but once I showed them [Indian staff] the reference pictures, it took them just one day to erect the ideal set for us,” Islam told The Express Tribune.

However, when the assistant director asked the Indian technical committee for a parrot and a cage, for an important part of the set, the committee members thought he was joking. “They laughed at first and then when I told them I’m serious, they told me that no panchi (bird) can be caged in New Delhi because there are laws against it!”

“A guy from the props department did create the perfect dummy parrot for us though,” added Islam.

Meanwhile, another member of the cast, Rauf Afridi, told The Express Tribune that it is by performing in India that one realises what a theatre audience actually is and how enjoyable it is to perform in front of a mature audience. “People were enthralled by our performance and what really made them cherish it was the command with which we delivered the dialogue in Urdu and more than the language, the rendition of dialogue in pure Urdu,” Afridi said, adding that the audience was so impressed that people from the Delhi Urdu Academy invited the whole troupe for a special dinner. However, they did not have enough time and were unable to accept the invitation.

The cast included senior TV artist Ayesha Khan, while Napa actors included Aimen Tariq, Akbar Islam, Bakhtawar Mazhar, Ali Sheikh, Ali Rizvi, Owais Mangalwala and Rauf Afridi. The play was about a Muslim family that had shifted from New Delhi to Pakistan (no city mentioned) and the post-partition problems they went through. It also highlighted the differences between the varying cultural lineages that migrants from different regions brought with them to Pakistan.

Napa performed at the festival organised by the NSD last year as well and the audience had loved their rendition of the Indian play, Shakuntala, which is written by Kalidasa. “My friends had been to the NSD festival before but it was my first time and the response we got on the other side of the border was much more than what I had expected,” Afridi confessed.

The only dark spot on their lively experience was that one of their cast members, Ali Shaikh, was unable to perform in Bombay Dreams, a play directed by Shah Sharabeel that started in Karachi on January 27. Shaikh said he had been rehearsing with Sharabeel for the past year and a half but because of the delay in visas, his performance in India was delayed and when he came back to Karachi, he was told that he had been fired.

However, the crew hailed the overall experience as a success since they were asked for an encore and they believed they had won the hearts of the Indian audience.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th,  2011.