The mystical and magical journey of Hatim Tai is an enthralling play invoking a sense of adventure, seduction and magic – a very Arabian Nights experience. Originally written by Mirwanjee Nursserwanjee Khanjee Aaram, Hatim Tai was adapted and directed by NAPA director Farhan Alam for the recently concluded NAPA Young Directors Theatre Festival 2015. prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Director and actor Farhan Alam brought Hatim Tai to life and did a great job, but he says it was tough to show magic and mystery with the limited props and actors that he had to work with.
“Hatim Tai requires a lot of props and costumes, and importantly actors – and as a director I would have loved to add all these flavours to this beautiful mysterious play about magic and adventure,” he told Instep.
“Ideally, I would need at least 65 actors and a large number of extras but we had to manage it within our limited crew – 8 to 10 actors did all the characters and more. You have no idea how much dedication and effort our team has to put in to pull such a huge project together – it is overwhelming.” Farhan added.
While adapting the play, Farhan added a surprise element. “Hatim Tai is completely unscripted. I didn’t write any dialogues… I told my actors what I wanted in the scene and we developed the dialogues while rehearsing.”
Kashif Hussain, known for plays like Winter’s Tale, Court Martial, Ali Baba and Chalees Chor and recently Mowgli’s Jungle, played Hatim Tai with great finesse and his agility on stage added to the adventurous streak of the Yemeni prince.
Kashif seems to have a flair for sword fighting which gave a feeling of authenticity to the fight scenes.
Suave Hatim Tai’s funny side-kick Dumroo was played by Hammad Siddiqi and provided welcome comic relief, giving the audience many laughs during the play. The scene where he is presented to the evil genie (Hammad Sartaj) as a sacrificial offering in the guise of Dumroo’s female version Dumree is notable.
The shy (read terrified), hairy, pot-bellied, not-so-virgin Dumree’s exchange with the evil genie is exceptional, as the disgusted genie asks why the villagers sent a middle-aged, manly woman as a sacrificial offering instead of a beautiful virgin. This was greeted with loud applause and laughter from the audience.
Seasoned actor/director Hammad Sartaj not only played the evil genie but also squeezed in several other roles in Hatim Tai: the Prince of Egypt, Jinn and the leader of thieves, and he did justice to each role by personalising it with a unique trait such as a vocal inflection or a physical characteristic like a limp.
Beautiful Erum Bashir portrayed the Princess of the Sea and she looked ravishing in her red harem costume – that she created herself – and matching jewellery. And although her scene was a short one, she managed to mesmerise the audience with her seductive belly dance adding to the element of romance that every adventurous story needs.
S. M. Jameel, Haris Khan, Hammad Khan and Faraz Chottani supported the main cast by playing all the other characters in the play. Like the swords fights, which were exciting, the magic was also thrilling as can be on stage. In one instance Hatim Tai was thrown to one side of the stage but simultaneously emerged from the other side. And the floating egg (suspended by a wire) was also a great touch as it moved in a vertical motion controlled by the magical powers of the genie and his group.
Not one scene left you wanting for more, the entire play flowed nicely and was immensely pleasing visually as well as performance wise.
Farhan had an important message to share after the performance: “This festival is ‘NAPA Young Directors Theatre Festival 2015’ – and I was expecting critics to get the directors’ viewpoint on how they developed and displayed their creativity. But that didn’t happen, the writers only saw the show – some of them only half way through, so I am told – and wrote about our plays. These reviews are incomplete without the director’s comment. Also, if the person reviewing the play leaves in the middle, they won’t know how the characters develop or where the story line goes.”
Other plays staged during the festival also deserve a mention: former Napa-ian Hammad Sartaj’s Here Lies a Noble Man was a real treat for Shakespeare lovers, combining two of the Bard’s greatest tragic works, Othello and Macbeth. Sartaj not only adapted and translated the play into Urdu retaining the flavour of conflicting human emotions as raw as Shakespeare would have loved, he also gave the viewer a chance to savour the characters of Iago and Macbeth together on stage for the first time ever.
“This festival was a chance for us to experiment as directors – and that is exactly what I tried to do with Shakespeare’s greatest plays,” Hammad Sartaj said. “I took the challenge and decided to take two of Shakespeare’s plays and show them simultaneously. It was a difficult task and maybe difficult for some to handle, but we were supposed to bring a difference to the stage and I think I did.”