The Agency: Off to a flying start

Saad Haroon brings out the best in Raza Arif in the first season of his show.

KARACHI:

From intentionally tripping on old ladies to flirting with audience members who were categorised as  ‘macho Nazimabadis’ or ‘frightened Burgers’, Saad Haroon’s new troupe, The Agency, was full of masterfully-engineered improvised humour with very few disappointments in their first season.

Haroon, the man who introduced improvisational theatre in Pakistan and set the tradition of English stand-up comedy, is back, after almost four years, with his new improvisational troupe consisting of Ali Gul Pir along with young university students including Syed Raza Arif, Ali Gul Pir, Sara Ashraf and Syed Osama.

The one to match

Pir, who has been doing improve for the past three years and has performed alongside Haroon in a couple of shows, has groomed his skill to the extent that he can single-handedly transform an apparently uninteresting and boring scene into one that sends audience in stitches. His back-to-back performances (with Light On Hai and The Agency) and the quintessentially Sindhi jokes (his trademark) have made him a noticeable face on the Karachi stage.

However, strange as it may be, it wasn’t Haroon or Pir who stole the show this season — the real discovery was 22-year-old Arif, whose first class skills combined with a variety of jokes in Urdu made the audience roll with laughter. His distinct style of humour — crude and localised — was appreciated by everyone watching. If given proper guidance and training, Arif can prove to be an asset to the long disgraced genre of Urdu stand-up comedy in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the other two performers, Ashraf and Osama, proved to be the weaker links of an otherwise strong troupe. Although good actors, they need to be more focused and learn the art of spontaneity better to enhance their performance for the future.

Let the games begin

The show was made more interesting with the incorporation of new games — something reminiscent of Saad Haroon’s first improvisational troupe Blackfish. One popular game was ‘The Bucket’, where a performer keeps his head in a bucket full of water until he runs out of breath and then suddenly enters an ongoing conversation and has to quickly explain why he is dripping in water.

Apart from that, another interesting game was the one in which Haroon gets people from the audience to make sounds that represent certain emotions, like nervousness, fear and frustration. He used the audience’s voices (which were mostly intonations of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’) to create an emotional orchestra while directing them like a formal music orchestra director.

However, the troupe fell short of the mark when it came to improvising songs and their inability to come up with razor sharp lyrics made the performance fall flat.

Although it was some of the members’ debut commercial-stage performance, the new troupe lived up to the standards set by Haroon. With the success of the opening season of The Agency, we now wonder what Haroon plans to bring in season two. It will be interesting to see The Agency head-to-head with Light On Hai, the other well-known improv troupe in Karachi.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 24^th, 2012.