Pakistan may have already put in its best performance at the London Olympics, even though the games are still several weeks away. Last week, Theatre Wallay and Kashf performed William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew at the historic Globe Theatre in London. The performance was part of the ongoing Globe to Globe festival, which brings together 37 performances of Shakespearean plays in 37 languages and has been dubbed the “cultural Olympics”. The Urdu-language offering was up against Coriolanus in Japanese, The Winter’s Tale in Yoruba, Love’s Labour’s Lost in British Sign Language and other Shakespearean classics in Swahili, Mandarin, Albanian, the Romance languages and many more.

The Taming of the Shrew revolves around two sisters, Bina (Bianca) and Kiran (Katherine). The former is beautiful, coquettish and courted by multiple suitors; the latter is haughty, scurrilous and, well, ‘shrewish’. The girls’ father refuses to let Bina accept the proposals of one of her suitors until Kiran is married. So when Rustum (Petruchio), a boisterous, uncouth landowner arrives in town seeking a wealthy bride, Bina’s suitors hatch a plot to pair him off with Kiran and finally woo Bina.

In staging the Pakistani adaptation of the play, the actors had to overcome several challenges: they had to perform to a multilingual audience, about one third of whom did not speak a word of Urdu. They also had to make full use of the daunting Globe theatre, with its thrust stage, layered galleries, scant acoustic support and open-air layout. And they had to give an adequate flavour of Pakistan’s cultural heritage without relying on the kind of cliché or pastiche that would bore the Pakistanis in the crowd. On all counts, Navid Shahzad’s production, directed by Haissam Hussain, did extremely well.

To accommodate for the language gap, the cast relied on exaggerated body humour, dynamic choreography and excellent comic timing. Actors swung canes and punches, poked and prodded, fought and fumbled through well-coordinated moves that amplified the emotions and events of the play. Their hyper movements were a throwback to authentic Shakespearean performances, which aimed at entertaining an illiterate audience, rather than educating a disconnected elite.

Linguistic distinctions were also overcome with the clever use of music and dance. The cast was accompanied on stage by the wonderful Mekaal Hasan Band playing folk tunes and filmi songs, providing varied soundtracks for romancing and fighting, and dramatising on-stage action with drum beats and other comic sound effects. The band’s catchy renditions of popular ditties often had audience members clapping along. Along with music, the play was also enlivened through dance: bhangra, kathak, luddi and choreographed Bollywood-style dances kept the diverse crowd entertained.

In addition to the slapstick humour and on-stage antics, Urdu-speaking audience members could enjoy Maryam Pasha, Zaibun Pasha and Aamna Kaul’s translation of Shakespeare’s script. While staying faithful to the original, the translators peppered the dialogue with zingy one-liners, bawdy jokes, pop culture references and sexual innuendo. The adaptation also represented characters from Pakistan’s four provinces and good naturedly poked fun at ethnic archetypes.

Despite the many challenges before them, Theatre Wallay and Kashf’s actors managed the physicality of the performances with aplomb. Omair Rana in the role of Rustum stole the show with garrulous, confident performance. He was supported by an excellent male ensemble — Osman Khalid Butt, Umer Naru and Mukkarum Kaleem in the roles of Bina’s suitors were hokey and hilarious as required. Salman Shahid also had the crowd in splits in the role of the girls’ father, though his words were occasionally scrambled. As for Nadia Jamil in the lead role of Kiran: she put in a strong performance as expected, but could have been even more shrewish (at times, her performance comprised primarily of expressive scowling). On the whole, the cast had phenomenal energy and a palpable connection — I couldn’t help wondering why so many performances back in Pakistan are unable to muster such a dynamic, and end up feeling leaden and draggy.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the performance, I had to question the choice of the play: The Taming of the Shrew has long been regarded as Shakespeare’s most misogynistic and it is performed increasingly infrequently in the West for this reason.

Transported to a Pakistani setting, into the third-most dangerous country in the world for women, the play’s anti-women themes felt a tad uncomfortable. The culminating scene of the play, when the obstinate Kiran submits to her husband Rustum and glorifies wifely obedience, was particularly awkward.

In a post-feminist era, this scene is played ironically, comically, aggressively. Here too an attempt was made to mitigate the play’s message with Kiran and Rustum coming together as equals during the speech by seeing eye to eye, holding hands and alternating turns to stand on a low stool substituting for the proverbial pedestal. But in light of the Pakistani context, it was difficult to completely transcend the harsh realities of the brutality that Pakistani women regularly face.

From a feminist perspective, the one redeeming factor of the play was the adaptors’ decision to cast the play’s narrator as a woman. It is Ravi (played by Maria Khan) who controls the performance: not only does she relay the narrative as it unfolds, she also drives it by shape-shifting into multiple characters as needed per the plot. Ravi also comments on all the on-stage action through facial expression and gesture, thereby serving as the audience’s silent interpreter.

Though intended as a straight comedy, the Pakistani rendition of The Taming of the Shrew also introduced (entirely inadvertently) a tragic element by evoking nostalgia for a Pakistan that is slowly ceasing to exist. The play is set in Lahore during the Basant festival, which is now officially banned. It depicts a Pakistan in which people from different ethnicities mingle, marry and make merry in perfect harmony. In the world of the play, education and the arts are highly valued, clerics are mocked and families accept ‘freewill’ marriages amongst youngsters (although Bina ends up eloping with Qazim, their fathers welcome them with open arms and a wedding feast).

The one incongruous moment in the play was when the director chose to indicate the dawning of a new day with the off-stage recitation of the Fajr prayer. During the scene, the stage was mostly empty and the few actors tasked with clearing away furniture left over from the previous scene moved lethargically. The audience’s mood became somber as the scene did not ring with the colour, humour and joy of the rest of the play. In an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable evening, this scene was the one painful reminder of the vibrant cultural heritage that Pakistanis are fast suppressing in favour of an overbearing religious identity.

The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (NOVEL) By Jude Morgan Headline, London ISBN 0755358236 400pp. Rs1,350