Napa to stage Urdu translation of ‘Romeo and Juliet’

The National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) is all set to bring to life arguably the most popular tragedy by Shakespeare by staging an Urdu adaptation of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, a play concerning two star-crossed lovers.

Veteran actor and head of the Napa theatre department Khalid Ahmed has translated the play into Urdu, which will be performed at the academy from June 17 till June 26. The play has been directed by master thespian Zia Mohyeddin.

Napa has earlier successfully staged Ahmed’s other Urdu translations of Shakespeare, including King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “For the past many years, it has been our practice to enact one of the greatest dramas of the literary world once a year [at Napa] and William Shakespeare tops the list of the greatest playwrights of all time,” Mohyeddin said on Thursday as he addressed a press conference alongside Ahmed and Napa CEO Junaid Zuberi.

“We have enacted many plays of Shakespeare in the past. There are two main objectives: One is to test our graduates’ ability to present a classical play. The second is to create in our viewers the understanding of the nature of classical plays,” he explained.

The play, which has been titled in one of its earliest publications as ‘The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’, is famous for its love poems. Mohyeddin said the biggest quality of the play was the unforgettable love poetry penned by Shakespeare. He added that critics were of the consensus opinion that no one had been able to match Shakespeare’s love poems in English or any other language till date.

He explained that it was next to impossible to render poetry composed in one language into another language while keeping its essence intact because the temperament of two languages was always different.

Lauding Ahmed’s translation of the play, Mohyeddin said there were lots of poems in the play with similes, metaphors and symbolism that could not be easily converted in a second language, but Ahmed took great care to preserve the aesthetic elements of such figures of speech in his translation by using such similes and metaphors that had connection with our poetic tradition.

To give an example, he said Shakespeare’s line “I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye/ Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow” was translated by Ahmed as “Ye to Surraiya ke abro ki afshan hai jo bekhar rahi hai”.

Speaking on the occasion, Ahmed said he was glad that Mohyeddin was the play’s director. Ali Sher and Noreen Gulwani, who will be playing Romeo and Juliet respectively, and other cast members of the play were also present on the occasion.