It seems Ajoka too has been infected by the common web of perceptions that have taken hold of this society. It is becoming increasingly difficult to see beyond the mélange of accusations, recriminations, bad mouthing everyone and every institution in the country. It is so widespread and self-consuming that it refuses to let the situation of this country be seen with any degree of objectivity.
Of the many standards criticisms with which to flog the horse of this country with, one is corruption and the other is the permanent divide between the privileged and the deprived. Obviously, even the democratic process is manipulated in such a manner that the people with privileges and resources come out the winners, rather than those who stoke the fires of a more equitable order and a system that offers equal opportunities for most members of this society.
The play Kaun Bane Ga Badshah was designed on the format of a prize show, so very popular these days on television because they fertilize ordinary people’s dream of becoming fabulously rich not only by virtue of sheer luck but with a quotient of knowledge as well. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or Kaun Bane Ga Crore Pati or earlier in Pakistan, on a now much more modest level, Neelaam Ghar were shows that were meant to reward your knowledge or luck with goods and money. This trend has caught on so much that even the religious programmes supposed to represent contentment and restraint have become platforms for people to salivate and fall over one another for more material goods and concrete returns.
Now our understanding and our values and our behaviour is supposed to be judged by material rewards and that too instant, rather than just a mere pat on the back for having done a duty.
So, in the play on who was going to become the king from among the four contestants, only a certain class of people, already at the very top, took part in this charade. Thus the field that appeared to be fair and open on the surface was actually rigged and manipulated underneath.
And the characters were the usual types representing the three provinces of the country and the fourth was a woman. So there was differentiation between provinces, while Balochistan was spared by supplementing it with gender, a young beautiful thing stepping into maidenhood while building on the inherited manipulative wiles to make men eat out of the palm of her hand.
The humour in the play relied very heavily on the wit and repartees which were at times rather bold and deviated from the practice of exercising restraint in its use.
The younger generation was of course eased into the bigger cloak and dagger world of politics by the older generation, an implication that politics and power in Pakistan was a game of inheritance like some other realities like privileges, entitlement and property. It is only a transfer from one generation to the next of all this with the ultimate price being paid by the people, represented by a weak disheveled half clad faqir or a darvesh whom everybody took for a ride and literally too.
As the author cum director Shahid Mahmood Nadeem said in his introductory remarks, the play was written and staged with the intent of entertaining the audience and the message was as if quite implied, unlike some of the other productions of the group where the message was loud and clear.
The humour in the play relied very heavily on the wit and repartees which were at times rather bold and deviated from the practice of exercising restraint in its use. The traditional slapstick derives its strength from the theatre in the Punjab where the main action is meant to be the rapid fire exchange of repartees between few actors, preferably two. There was and is plenty of criticism of this traditional theatre which is held everyday in many venues, for example, in Lahore. But it is clear that any one small step towards comedy that strikes a chord with the people is an instant and big step of identification with the same theatre of ribaldry.
That commercial theatre is probably not scripted for a number of reasons, the primary being the fear of censorship and it is left to the actors to adlib. Since they are not working with a script, their repartees and remarks have certain freshness about them. They happen to be the very best in business and it is the ability to improvise that guarantees their stage life.
It is probably the pull of tradition for, even in the various television programmes, it appears that the same sensibility has seeped in to take hold of the shows, whether political or social. Even in the talk shows that happen to be the most popular on electronic media Amanullah, Sohail Ahmed, Khalid Abbas Dar and Iftikhar Thakur with many others hog the limelight almost every night, mixing politics, morality and ethics in their own stew of the slapstick.
The play included a cast that had many new faces. It was a combination of the young and the not very fresh faces, a mixture that works well for it is also a bulwark against defection on a substantial scale. There was piped music in the play and plenty of dance-like movements that have become the hallmark of Ajoka’s productions in the last thirty odd years of its journey.