Graduating ACP theatre students enthral audience in ‘Clue’

Pulling off a mystery farce play on stage is a challenging job, which was decently accomplished by graduating students of the Arts Council Theatre Academy on Tuesday as they enacted an Urdu adaptation of Jonathan Lynn’s Clue based on a popular board game in which players have to solve a murder mystery.

The performance was directed by Arts Council faculty member Farhan Alam Siddiqui. The translation of the English play into Urdu was done by Zobi Fatima, who was also one of the actors.

The set design and lighting deserve a special mention as the play needed an elaborate stage that simultaneously showed multiple rooms of a large mansion such as kitchen, library, drawing room, etc. where a mysterious host has invited six persons.

It is later revealed that all the invitees have a criminal background and the host has evidence of their shady past who wants to blackmail them to extort money from them. Besides the host and his six guests, there are also a butler, a cook and another servant in the mansion. Some uninvited guests also show up in the gathering where eventually multiple murders take place and the audience keeps guessing the culprit(s) till the end when the mystery is resolved.

As the play’s genre was mystery farce, it succeeded more on the farce side as the characters, especially Colonel Mustard played by Ajnesh Dodeja, kept on acting in a purely wild manner drawing chuckles from the audience. On the mystery side, the play was weaker as the solution of the mystery was not very convincing.

It took some minutes for the script to grab the attention as the initial part when guests arrive was too farcical and absurd to make any solid sense of the play. However, when it was established that all the six guests were being blackmailed by the host, the play suddenly became interesting and the audience was hooked.

Given the fact that all the actors — Zobi, Dodeja, Arsalan Malik, Ali Raza, Ali Raza (another actor), Hassan Alam, Fatima Adil, Dilbod Rahim, Muhammad Asif — are graduating students, it was overall a worthy production. Some of the actors, however, need to work more on their voice as occasionally they sounded monotonous and there were moments when their dialogues were not clearly audible.

Also, some of the dialogues could also have been easily omitted as they defied the cultural sensibilities of the Pakistani audience. They sounded more inappropriate when many children were also in the audience.