PNCA drama festival: An interesting premise let down by a weak script

The suspense in ‘Wrong Number’ kept the audience from leaving.

ISLAMABAD:

“Wrong Number”, the sixth performance in the ongoing Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) Drama Festival, was a blend of light comedy and suspense. The premise had potential, but the bad script and weak execution left much to be desired.

The story revolved around a housewife who is fearful of the outside world and how a supposedly outlandish thief attempts to rob her. Shamsa, played by Aysha, is the wife of an aging man, Saleem, played by renowned TV artist Aftab Quraishi, who are without children and live in a house in the suburbs.

One day, when her husband is out of the city and only her servant is at the house, the lights go out. The fearful Shamsa turns to her servant, who says, “batti tau ji atti jatti retti hay” (the lights keep coming and going).

The comment, for obvious reasons, won a big applause from the audience.

It is then that a robber, Tahir, armed with a pistol, enters the house and asks Shamsa and her servant to stay calm.

But Tahir is no ordinary criminal -- he presents himself as an official of the adventure club on a secret mission by orders of his boss “Carloo” to stay at her house till 2:30am.

Throughout the duration of the story, he keeps Shamsa in sight, keeping her from going to her room or the kitchen, and whenever the house phone receives a call, he responds by saying that it’s a “wrong number”, thus giving the play its name.

The events that follow were testament to the play’s engaging storyline, as nobody was sure till the very end whether Tahir was a robber or was actually sent on a strange mission.

Tahir’s impersonation of Shamsa’s blind cousin in an attempt to keep his cover when they receive some unexpected guests was the highlight of the production.

The revelation at the end that Tahir is in fact a thief comes as a surprise. While he keeps Shamsa and her servant occupied, his two accomplices are busy wiping the house clean. The truth is revealed when Shamsa’s husband enters the house with the police. Saleem tells his wife he brought the police with him as he got worried no one answered the phone.

Batin Farooqi’s acting as the thief was commendable (he also directed the play), but the rest of the actors, let down by a weak script and poor execution, failed to shine.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 18^th, 2011.