How civic convulsions cause split personalities

While we live with social convulsive upheavals day in and day out, little do we realise how silently yet profoundly they are affecting our mental health. We may just treat them as unpleasant news, little knowing how these riotous situations are wreaking havoc on our person.

This precisely was the theme of the play, Baaztab, staged on the evening of March 23 in Napa’s overly compact basement theatre as part of the ongoing International Theatre and Music Festival 2017.

It is the story of a young girl, Rameen, who develops a split personality disorder. The chief causative factors behind the disorder are her father’s death in a civic riot in Karachi and her mother’s subsequent second marriage to another man. 

This second husband is very traditional in his social outlook with very patriarchal views on the role of women in society. What exacerbates matters is when Rameen, who is in love with a young man, is married off to another man. This over time causes her to assume different personas. She drifts into fits of insanity and causes convulsive situations. So very often she is reminded of her affair with a dashing young man, a romance that begins, out of all the places, in a lift which is trapped.

The story gradually unfolds in her sessions with a psychiatrist astutely played by Shumaila Taj. In her discourse, Taj narrates the causative factors behind the crisis which make for very interesting information about psychiatry.

In short, the play highlights the issues of discrimination, honour, gender-related violence and the strains and stresses thrust on the citizens by having to live in a city riddled with violence, which affects the citizens at every step without their being aware of it. The violence, caused by the yawning chasm between the haves and the have-not, the disparity caused by the machinations of the profit-crazy capitalists, has a disastrous effect on the masses.

All the cast performed their roles most adroitly. But special credit goes to Zarqa naz as Rameen, the girl with the split personality disorder. Her acting was superb given that it is very difficult to portray a mentally disturbed person and she did it so effectively. She made her role really powerful.