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| Another convincing play in the city |
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Sunday, November 08, 2009
By our correspondent
Karachi
The play ‘Meri Jan’ by the theater company Creative Workshop succeeded to put on a real show. The play is Marc Camelotti’s erstwhile comic play Boeing Boeing’s vernacular form.
However Creative Workshop, originally formed in 1983 which has now been overrun by the NAPA graduates, solicited the expert services of writer and director Dr. Anwar Sajjad and celebrated television artist Faisal Qureishi. Apart from them another celebrated artists to come out of the NAPA batches, Akbar Islam relinquished his onstage presence for a behind the scenes role as the producer.
The story of the play, with which the audience was already familiar thanks to a Bollywood movie, revolves around a Karachi based businessman Jamil played by Faisal Qureishi, who owns a flat by the sea side, and lives with his maid Amma, played by, Afshan Qureishi. Jamil’s apartment is the resting spot for three air hostesses who serve different air lines. All three air hostesses, the playful Nargis (Aimen Tariq), the serious Najma (Zhalay Sarhadi) and the fire cracker Zarina (Mehvish Siddiqui) are Jamil’s girlfriends-cum-fiancés. However each one of the three hostesses is oblivious to the existence of the other girls. Jamil utilises his cunning smartness by carefully remembering the international flights schedule to play his balancing act.
Just as Jamil’s deceiving tactics seem to be going fine, his childhood friend Bashir Dar (Saquib Khan) comes to visit him from Rawalpindi and things start to go wrong. The schedule, by which Jamil had been using to manage time for his girlfriends, starts to backfire. The flights which were to depart are cancelled, those that were delayed land early, and those scheduled to depart end up postponed. This results in all three air hostesses to bunk at Jamil’s apartment at the same time.
Jamil, now assisted by Bashir, tries to handle the situation and succeeded to avoid the collision of the girls temporarily. But then Nargis mistakenly throws her arms round a sleeping Bashir taking him as Jamil. This sparks off a series of misconceptions and confusions which ends in Jamil eventually failing to hide one girl from the others.
The play has many things which were appreciable.The set of the play, designed by seasoned set artist Tanveer Abbas worked flawlessly. Saquib Khan, who has proved his acting skills time and time again in NAPA plays, gave yet another convincing performance by beautifully playing the role of Bashir.
The Faisal Qureishi was equally convincing as the leading character of the play. He largely succeeded to make the audience laugh. Some in the audience, for lack of a better means to express their delight resorted to whistling in appreciation of Qureishi’s and Khan’s acting.
Meanwhile the real magic proved to be in the perfect coordination of the actors, their ability to recuperate instantaneously from mistakes of others resulted in a humorous performance that left the audience hysterical. The play will run till the 20th of November at the Arts Council Auditorium.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
