Playing it by the ear

The ongoing Youth Performing Arts Festival offered some entertaining performances but they have lacked good scripts.

LAHORE: While people expect different things from a theatre performance, the one aspect everyone agrees on is that a play must have a great script. A play with a weak script may have excellent performances, brilliant lighting and superb stage design but still cannot make the impact which a play with a strong script can.

The ongoing Youth Performing Arts Festival has offered some entertaining performances but they have lacked good scripts. The plays drag on endlessly and while the theme of the play is interesting, it doesn’t always pan out in practice.

One example is of a play called Awam Ghar, which was staged by students of Punjab University. It mocked news channels that broadcast talk shows featuring politicians from different provinces and fighting on-screen to sell the shows. The actors danced and shouted, quarrelled and got into a scuffle but the performance was somewhat crude.

Scripts also need to be solid from start to finish and tell a cohesive story. A play titled Bandya, which was performed by students of the Salamat International Campus for Advanced Studies, was about the unjust treatment meted out to honest people in society. The play showed a professor who was booked wrongly for catching a minister’s son cheating in an exam, a colonel who revealed the corruption of his seniors and a woman whose daughter was raped. But the play ended abruptly and couldn’t justify the events that had transpired.

Hum Pakistan, which was recently staged by students of the National College of Arts and Lahore University of Management Sciences at the Lahore Arts Council, could have been a brilliant play had it been supported by a good script. The play was about flood victims but looked as if it had been written in hurry.

However organisers believe that the students are doing well. Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop Creative Director Faizaan Peer-zada said, “We shouldn’t compare this festival to previous festivals. This is a festival to break inertia and still a very sizeable one.”

A university teacher said, “The script might have been weak in several performances but one should realise that there are very few outlets for youth to show their talent. In the past, inter-collegiate and university festivals helped students improve a lot but this has literally come to a standstill. The performances improve when you perform regularly. We have to start somewhere and once we do them regularly we will improve.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 29^th, 2010.