A sustained performance by Imran Aslam and Rehana Saigol at the Lahore Literary Festival
The two performances of Love Letters staged at the Lahore Literary Festival last week by Mutual Administration Society were for the initiated.
The English theatre or plays in English language were usually the preserve of educational institutions. After popular theatre was established in the port cities of subcontinent, the next big development was the institutionalisation of theatre in the academia; and what better plays to stage than Elizabethan ones? Among them, Shakespeare was undoubtedly the most sought-after and performed. It also served the purpose as he was part of the curriculum when literature as a subject was introduced at the higher level.
For institutions like the Government College, Lahore it was like an article of academic faith that no play could be staged in a language other than English. After much quiet agitation -- as the college was known for in 1950s, Urdu plays were grudgingly allowed on the campus but not to be staged in the sacred sanctum of theatre, the Old Hall. Rather these were permitted only to be staged at the college’s Open Air Theatre, thus outside the main structure and not billed as annual plays of the college -- a privilege only reserved for an English play.
This tradition did continue after 1947 but with less vigour and belief in other institutions, more so in the women colleges which initially were more conservative in the preservation of traditions. Some of the clubs-- the likes of Gymkhana and those run by big companies-- also staged plays in English but the mantle continued to rest with colleges and later with the many private schools that sprung up in the decades after the 1980s.
Most of the plays in the last decades have been staged in these schools. A few plays of Neil Simons were produced sporadically over the years, but a new trend of musicals, usually inspired from films that had been made these famous worldwide like The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Chicago, Mamma Mia etc have been staged in the past few years. These huge productions were managed very successfully by the people organising these especially their commercial side.
What are the rules to evaluate a drama on stage that has no action but only the presence of two characters totally involved in the reading of letters that they write to each other? Usually, a play is meant to be action. Aristotle defined it as imitation of significant action, and here was a play totally devoid of action. It was just two characters on stage, involved in a sedentary reading of letters to each other from the two sides of the stage. It might have been a radio play where the entire emphasis is on the delivery of the broadcaster. Since nothing else is meant to be seen by the listener on the radio, the entire focus narrows down to the voice as it is supposed to substitute for the movement of the body and the expression of the face.
The question to ask is: why was a radio play or the format of a radio play chosen to be performed? But since the Aristotelian canons, the stage play has undergone so many changes that even he would be at a loss to define what he saw today as theatre or the stage play. From Waiting for Godot to the massive intervention of technology, the drama has swung from one end to the other, struggling to redefine the meaning of theatre. But if theatre means human dilemma as delivered by two characters on stage then it qualified to be the skimpiest form of theatre -- very basic and minimalist in nature.
Read also: For the love of letters
Gurney’s Love Letters is a good play and it was made into a successful Indian production by Javed Siddiqui, who translated and adapted it into Urdu and called it Tumhari Amrita. For years, Farooq Sheikh and Shabana Azmi played the two characters to raving reviews and great critical acclaim. It was directed by Feroz Abbas and was also staged once in Karachi with the two aforesaid celebrities playing the two characters of Amrita and Zulfiqar Haider. It was also staged in Punjabi as Teri Amrita with Om Puri and Divya Dutta playing the lead.
When performed in Lahore, there was something in the language that clicked instantly. The Punjabi of Teri Amrita was full of charge and carried the idiomatic richness which made the otherwise sedentary performance into a combination of restraint and repressed emotion. A relationship that exists in words and does not go beyond it to be translated into something more instant was quite palpable. It retained immediacy and combined it well with frustration.
In Pakistan, the same play has been staged more than once in Karachi by Imran Aslam and Rehana Saigol, initially in 1999, but later with other ladies while Imran Aslam has remained a constant. It was again a sustained performance holding the audiences’ attention for more than two hours with a generator more than humming in the background and the sound system breaking down. It all happened because the festival had to be shifted to a new venue at the last minute from the Alhamra. Since the entire focus had to be on voice, both Rehana Saigol and Imran Aslam’s transition from a youthful tone to one grating with age was very strikingly realistic. Hameed Haroon, the director, sensing the difficulty of performance must have considered slightly editing the script but instead opted for pieces of music and backdrop of photographs, as a reminder of the journey in time that the two characters cover.
From being children to middle and then old age brought forth the yearning and burning desire that accompanies unrequited love. Some of these pieces of music were Summertime, My Boy Lollipop, Que Sera Sera, Lucky Lips, A Fine Romance, Are You Lonesome, Those were the Days, It’s Now or Never in the voices of some of the best known vocalists/ musicians like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Liza Minnelli, Millie Small, Doris Day, Diana Ross, Elvis Presley, Ginger Rogers, Cliff Richard and Mary Hopkin.