review
Forging history, performing memory
Shakespeare in Kabul captures the triumphs and foibles of Afghan actors as they march through the pages of a non-fictional account in a cavalcade
By Aasim Akhtar  
Consuming the country for decades, the shocking atrocities of the Afghan civil wars have rendered it one of those historical events considered too appallingly horrific to be remembered, represented or even named. Still referring to the devastating period as “the events,” the Afghans employ a somewhat nondescript, yet very telling colloquialism for a war, which destroyed a good portion of Kabul’s physical and psychological infrastructure. In the larger historical narrative of Near East, the Afghan wars have become emblematic of the political fragility and a tragically unheeded reminder of the potential for violence smouldering under the surface of postcolonial societies. Yet despite the immense hangover of the civil strife, its critical discussion remains contained within particular discourses, such as the controversial reconstruction of the city centre and the pioneering literary responses to the war years.  

Jest on the lips
Adiah Afraz’s collection of columns follows the tradition of political and social wit
By Dr Tariq Rahman  
If you have bought this beautiful little book because you have an unquenchable curiosity about people’s “affairs” — in the societal parlance of the word— you should try to sell it to a gullible friend. But if you want to enjoy wit and satire and have a taste for humour, of which there is so much dearth in this country, then read it and read it again. You will not be disappointed. The book has seven sections and fifty-five articles published in The News in the last two years.

Zia Mohyeddin column
Through the mind’s eye
Drama brings to life the good and the bad, but not just good as good and bad as bad. The essence of drama is to reveal how much bad there is amongst the good and vice versa.
Drama explores human relationships and human complexities; drama unfolds the demons that are buried in our souls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

review
Forging history, performing memory
Shakespeare in Kabul captures the triumphs and foibles of Afghan actors as they march through the pages of a non-fictional account in a cavalcade
By Aasim Akhtar

Consuming the country for decades, the shocking atrocities of the Afghan civil wars have rendered it one of those historical events considered too appallingly horrific to be remembered, represented or even named. Still referring to the devastating period as “the events,” the Afghans employ a somewhat nondescript, yet very telling colloquialism for a war, which destroyed a good portion of Kabul’s physical and psychological infrastructure. In the larger historical narrative of Near East, the Afghan wars have become emblematic of the political fragility and a tragically unheeded reminder of the potential for violence smouldering under the surface of postcolonial societies. Yet despite the immense hangover of the civil strife, its critical discussion remains contained within particular discourses, such as the controversial reconstruction of the city centre and the pioneering literary responses to the war years.

Shakespeare in Kabul, however, offers an innovative means of interrogating the often-contested boundaries of artistic and historical representation.

Afghanistan is a country carved out of violence. With a woefully short tradition of theatre: performances dating back to the 1920s; or Kabul University’s theatre programmes cut down by civil war; or the sole modern theatre built by the Germans now lying in ruins, it has, nevertheless, staged real-life dramas (read tragedies) since time immemorial, based on conquests, intrigues, conspiracies, coup d’états, civil strife and factionalism. It has been home to the Hazarajat, the Dari-ban, the Pashtuns, the Soviets, the Mujahideen, the Taliban and now the Americans who’ve finally arrived — equipped with NATO supplies and UN-funded NGOs — to stabilise a war-ravaged landscape.

The western-funded Foundation for Culture and Civil Society, housed in a 150-year old mansion in what once used to be Kabul’s outskirts, is another feather in the crown. Headed by an enlightened Dutchman Robert Kluijver in 2005, the year the story’s based; it was here that the first-ever Shakespearean production in Afghanistan was jointly conceived by Stephen Landrigan and Corinne Jaber. In the spring of 2005, anything seemed possible; optimism prevailed. Violence was down, and everything seemed to be returning to normality. “Ensnared in the enchantment spun by its roses, its grand arches and doorways, its terraces and balconies…so many places for entrances and exits, “Landrigan turned to Jaber to say softly, “We must do a show here.” To which she whispered back: “Yes…Shakespeare.”

Thus the project eponymously titled ‘Shakespeare in Kabul’ began.

And that’s how the Bard made his debut appearance in Kabul in 2005. Landrigan and Jaber first met on an expedition to Mazar-i-Sharif where Kluijver had organised a festival of music.  Stephen Landrigan, an American playwright and director, had come to Kabul to chronicle a US-based educational programme in order to pay off his financial backers after the commercial failure of his last play at the Edinburgh Festival. Corinne Jaber, a Paris-based stage actor of tremendous repute, had come to Kabul to visit a friend. Jaber of German and Syrian descent had worked with Peter Brook, made several appearances at Les Bouffes du Nord, and won the Moliere Award for The Beast on the Moon.

Shakespeare in Kabul penned by Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar captures the triumphs and foibles of the actors as they march through the pages of a non-fictional account in a cavalcade. Divided into three broad chapters, ‘Exposition, Climax and Resolution’, the account follows the slow, distressing drift of choosing the ‘right’ play to be performed before the Afghans that spoke about transformation and disenfranchisement not just of place but of spirit. “A tragedy play is too soon now” came the shout followed by “We have lived tragedy for three decades of war. We don’t want to do tragedy”. So Love’s Labour’s Lost became the ultimate contender. Certainly the play pushed the limits on rules about mingling of the sexes, by featuring four men and four women together in the cast, amazingly without negative audience feedback. The most compelling sub-chapters in the book recount the stories re-enacted by female actors from real-life events during the auditions; their angst, their frustrations, their pain and anguish all spilling forth in a flood of emotions.

Casting was a challenge though Jaber managed to recruit big names: Marina Gulbahari, known for her role in the film Osama which had garnered America’s Golden Globe and Cannes’ AFCAE Award; Nabi Tanha who appears in The Kite Runner; and the female actor Breshna Bahar who’d done a role in Bulbul. The problem of putting together unrelated men and women chafed, however. For weeks they wouldn’t sit next to one another.

 With funding from the British Council, and without any Dari version of Shakespeare save the one translated into archaic Farsi by an Iranian scholar, the play kicked off first in the magnificent garden palace of the Foundation for Culture and Civil Society, then the crumbling Queen’s Palace in Kabul, and finally in the Citadel in Herat. Women favoured Central Asian attires with headscarves et al over burqa, and men wore shalwar kameez. The only props employed were kilims.

Good feelings sadly didn’t last. Around that time, a US military vehicle lost control and ploughed into a crowd in Kabul killing several Afghans. A bomb went off at Herat University to protest the education of women and Parwin Mushtahel’s husband was killed in apparent protest of her participation. But the spark had been lit. The organisers of World Shakespeare Festival invited Corinne Jaber to London to participate in Richard II. “Afghans don’t do tragedy,” she told them. The troupe, now called Roy-e-Sabz performed The Comedy of Errors at the Globe Theatre in London.

Love’s Labour’s Lost explores the constant slippage between historical and fictional narration which occurs in the performance of memory. Although the success of the play did not depend upon the audience’s consciousness of the work’s fictive nature, there were constant hints that slipped through the cracks. Landrigan’s and Omar’s detailed stitching of the Bard’s costume in his presentation format that transforms fictional into historical narration, consequently dismantling the opposition often built between the two forms of telling and retelling. More than that, by blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, Landrigan unearthed the performance of memory’s involvement in the construction of all narrative forms. Art, conventionally perceived as inhabiting a more aesthetic value in fictional representation, thereby allowed Landrigan to ask the question of what can be imagined about historical reconstruction, and more specifically about the traumatic experiences of the civil wars.

If theatre cannot transform the world, it can at least influence the representation that men or women make of it. It can contribute to the struggle against indifference or, more prosaically, permit us to know one aspect of the life of the Other, and understand its difference from our own. With this hope or ambition, the great expanse of time permitted profundity, but also a form of non-temporality that gave the production as a whole unique consistency. The production was charged with intention, with ethics, and with meaning, and marked by respect for the Other.

With infinite care, the director defined his frames and his aesthetic, gave droit de cite — literally, the right to the city, or the right of belonging — to those who did not have it. He insisted on the dignity of the human being, while reality, beauty, and truth fought for space and meaning in his work. Love’s Labour’s Lost moved beyond self-expression, addressing the intelligence of men and women, with the intention of including them also, in a tragedy as grotesque as it is devoid of meaning which we call, by default, history.

Shakespeare in Kabul

By Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar

Publisher: Haus

Publishing Limited

Pages: 230

Price: Rs 2185

 

 

 

Jest on the lips
Adiah Afraz’s collection of columns follows the tradition of political and social wit
By Dr Tariq Rahman

If you have bought this beautiful little book because you have an unquenchable curiosity about people’s “affairs” — in the societal parlance of the word— you should try to sell it to a gullible friend. But if you want to enjoy wit and satire and have a taste for humour, of which there is so much dearth in this country, then read it and read it again. You will not be disappointed. The book has seven sections and fifty-five articles published in The News in the last two years.

These humorous sketches need to be placed in the sub-genre of Pakistani literature in English which I have called “prose” in my almost forgotten book A History of Pakistani Literature in English. The chapter is only 16 pages long and yet it was difficult to find humour which could fit the slot. I wanted to leave out biographies and boring sermons which made the selection so difficult. Finally I settled for the works, newspaper pieces of course, of Omar Kureishi, Anwar Mooraj, Haleem Abdul Aziz, M.R. Kayani, and, of course, the inimitable Khalid Hasan. Some of these people are no more and those who do exist have given up the humorous column. I too once wrote a column called ‘It’s a Don’s Life’ in The Frontier Post about a university professor’s reflections on the unscrupulous practices of his brothers-in-law (one a retired general and the other a federal secretary) but gave up after a few years—or was it merely months. Wit and humour is hard to sustain week in and week out as anyone who has tried such things will tell you.

As such there was a gap in our literature in English which Adiah Afraz has tried to fill in. Her earliest columns are the ones which I like best being in the central tradition of political and social wit. There is the intimacy of absurd conversation, the incongruous situation and the overall response to that. Irony is tongue in cheek and and wit scintillates asking the reader to laugh at the absurdities of our existence. Take the ‘Sitara and the Stinky Journalist’. The conversation is hilarious ending with:

‘So will you shut up when you get your free Sitara.’

 ‘So will you when they give you yours?’

‘Maybe.’

 ‘Then maybe it is’.

Such pieces of sparkling wit abound but cannot be reproduced at length outside the context in which they were written. They have to be read to be enjoyed.

 Apart from the conversation is the absurdity of the situation: ATMs closed in the morning; policeman ready to hand over a stiff sentence to the writer for some imaginary violation; an under-aged girl hitting her from behind. And all this against the background of power outages and a husband whose role is to take everything in his stride as the kind of fuss women make. That is the stuff of which the sketches are written.

 The last few sketches, however, are in support of Imran Khan. However, in this sub-genre of literature, readers do not expect a wit, especially a social and political satirist, to actively support any political personality seriously. They are supposed to keep away with a jest on the lips and irony never far behind. So while Adiah Afraz, the person can support Imran Khan as much as she likes, Afraz the columnist must be more subtle. However, she calls herself his “fan” without irony. To emphasise this point once again, this would be fine in anyone else and we have a right to support anyone we like without having to defend ourselves. But those of us who aspire to wit and humour must also understand that a political satirist is bound by the conventions of his writing not to express this in columns. But, of course, there is another way out. Adiah could abandon humour and wit and dedicate herself to being a serious supporter of her political hero. She can still write columns but they would be different in quality than most of her present output. Moreover, for writing serious political columns she would have to read more about the history, politics and economy of Pakistan. That would be a new experiment and one for which her many admirers will wait impatiently.

 I wish I could praise the quality of printing. The jacket is fine but there are empty spaces and wrong spellings inside. Surely the author deserves better.

Affairs etc.

By Adiah Afraz

Publisher: Watandost

Pages: 232

 

 

Zia Mohyeddin column
Through the mind’s eye

Drama brings to life the good and the bad, but not just good as good and bad as bad. The essence of drama is to reveal how much bad there is amongst the good and vice versa.

Drama explores human relationships and human complexities; drama unfolds the demons that are buried in our souls.

There is no need for drama to compete with fiction in which so much more in the way of detail can be supplied. Drama is the art of elemental. The genius of theatre, its brilliance, intellect, taste, has all gone into a search for the elemental. Much that in fiction can be gradual and multiple has, in drama, to be sudden and single. The dramatist exploits the possibilities of suddenness and singleness. W. B. Yeats said that “Drama is, in the most obvious way, what all the arts are upon a last analysis.”

The theatre of the Greeks, with its traditional austerity of setting on the hill-side bred poetic drama of universal theme and cosmic expression. It was the spoken word that controlled what Euripedes and Sophoclese’ audience saw — the words contained and created the drama.

Shakespeare’s playhouse, likewise, bred poetic drama, but now there was a difference. The confinement within the ‘wooden O’ (this is how Shakespeare described the stage on which his plays were presented) could house the particular as well as the universal, the domestic as well as the cosmic. The spoken word, however, remained supreme. The task of bringing home drama (classical drama) lies wholly with the actor— and particularly with his voice, his gesture and his movements.

Shakespeare rarely offers any stage directions in his texts. This does not mean that the great actors of his own era — Burbage, Alleyn — simply stepped forward and spoke their soliloquies standing in one position. Shakespeare (who had a considerable say in the staging of his own plays) wouldn’t have allowed it. Actors, throughout the ages, have found ways of moving about while delivering the Bard’s long speeches, as befitted their genius.

Olivier was one of the greatest 20th          century Shakespearean actors and his Macbeth was one of his best performances that it has been my privilege to see. The way he handled “Is this a dagger?” speech still haunts my memory. After dismissing the servant with the laconic message to Lady Macbeth, he advanced to the very front of the stage. Turing to assure himself that the servant had gone, he was confronted with his hallucination which first puzzled, then excited him. His tone was confident. It was with a show of eagerness that he pounced to clutch the dagger. The direction of his hand fixed the dagger’s position. His eager movement took him past the point and he wheeled round in bewilderment so that we suddenly saw his face transfixed with abject dismay.

The miming of hallucination is something I have seen in other Macbeths. (It is well within the compass of many actors). It was in the visionary expansion of the sequel that Olivier showed his genius.

The soliloquy continues:

“......

Now o’er the one half world

Nature seems dead, and wicked

dreams abuse

The curtained sleep, witchcraft

celebrates

Pale Hacate’s offerings; and

wither’d murder

Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with

his sleathly pace

With Tarqun’s ravishing strides, towards

his designs

moves like a ghost...”

 

Olivier’s eye in a frenzy rolling, comprehended the hemisphere, his voice darkening after the bright shrillness of panic dropped a tone on the word “dead.” We were made to see, unmistakeably, the curtained sleep of Duncan at the moment shut up in content and we felt the sinister echo of Banquo’s wicked dreams — the cursed thoughts that nature gives way to in repose.

The kaleidoscope turned, and presented us with the baleful ritual of the weird sisters. Then, unforgettably, Olivier shrugged his body to impersonate withered murder, heard the wolf’s alarum — the howl on Olivier’s lips was a howl indeed to curdle the blood —and moved with stealthy pace towards the staircase.

*****

Only a virtuoso player with his trained voice and expert gesture can present to us the rich texture of Shakespeare’s score. The tone of Lear’s voice in the last scene, with its initial clamour of wailing, the agonised restraint of Othello in the last scene when he says “Soft you, a word or two before you go” are moments which make us aware that Shakespeare’s design is to show us how imperfect men grow to become perfect.

The task of the Shakespearean actor is to animate, to bring to life, to communicate to his audience the substance of the words of Shakespeare’s text. These contain within themselves the drama, and so rich is this substance that it is seldom to be confined within the three walls of the picture stage. Hamlet soliloquising over the ills of his present life; “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses, of this world...Tis an weeded garden, that grows to seed...” Lear urging Cordelia to join him in “Taking upon’s the mystery of things”, evokes half a dozen pictures in as many lines.

To communicate Shakespeare’s effect the actor must make these seen by the audience not with the natural vision but the mind’s eye. This was easier to achieve in the Elizabethan playhouse where the actor stood on the great platform in close and intimate contact with the audience.

Take the world’s most popular soliloquy: “To be or not to be...” There is a whole series of images contained in this one soliloquy. “the whips and scorns of time”, “the oppressor’s wrong” “the proud man’s contumely”, “... the law’s delay, the insolence of office., etc etc.” If a film-maker were to aim at photographing the whole series of images contained in this one soliloquy the camera could not work fast enough. And what about the sound track? It if tries to cope with the “whips and scorns of time” one moment, and “the sea of troubles” the next, the tragedy would never end. You cannot photograph poetic drama whose appeal is not merely through the eye but for the most part through the mind’s eye, as prompted by the words, the movements and the gestures of the actor.

Shakespeare’s dramatic pattern lies not so much in the plot but in the succession of episodes that mark the development of the story. It is in the substance of the text, the constantly shifting narrative, wit, word-play and irony. And all these elements— as well as the emotional inter-action and philosophical speculation —touch the mind and heart of the audience through their ears and through the mind’s eye.

 

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