Rex: The review

“Oedipus Rex" was a third-year students’ production, it surprisingly proved to be better than recent productions.

KARACHI: The National Academy of Performing Arts kick-started 2011 with the reprisal of “Oedipus Rex”, a 2010 production opened to the public for the first time.

Napa’s “Oedipus Rex’” an Urdu translation of a Greek tragedy by Sophocles was staged on Friday night. Although the play was a third-year students’ production, it surprisingly proved to be much better than the recent productions of the Napa Repertory Theatre.

The play was directed by Sadia Khan, a faculty member at Napa and Uzma Sabeen, member of the assistant faculty. The original script of Sophocles was translated into Urdu by Ahmed Aqeel Ruby.

With directorial excellence, the play was a decent effort, captivating the audiences till the very end even though it was overdone in a few places.

Though meant to maintain the Greek touch of the original play, it did not seem to fulfil the basics of a Greek performance. What added to the localisation of the play were venue constraints. The Greek plays used to be performed on a flat horizontal space making blocking possible in two directions only, the stage right and the stage left. This wasn’t the case with the local version of the play.

Contrary to what the actors said in the preview, the Urdu script was not up to the mark. The translation was literal thereby taking away the essence of the original script. Greek plays were primarily heard and not seen. The power of words carried immense importance but in the local version, the opposite happened as the meaning of the play came through the visual performance and not through dialogue.

In terms of acting, Adnan Jaffar, a promising addition to the list of actors in Pakistan, played Oedipus and he left no stone un-turned in proving that it wasn’t a play about Oedipus but it was essentially Oedipus’ play. Akbar Islam, who played Creon, shared some powerful moments with Jaffar and at times overshadowed him. Islam Khashkheli, who played the blind fortune teller, shared the stage for a short time but impressed all.

Marring the potential excellence of the play was the performance of the of the other cast members. Samina Nazeer who played Oedipus’ wife didn’t seem like a trained actor from Napa. Her performance was flawed from diction to movement.

All in all, it was a promising performance by the students. There were areas where the team could have done a better job improve but the play closed as a much appreciated effort by the youngsters, making Jaffar and Khashkheli the latest discoveries of this batch of thespians.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 9^th, 2011.