KARACHI: Known poet and playwright Sarmad Sehbai penned Dark Room in the early 1970s. It’s a 90-minute play, almost, that poses questions of man’s freedom and how far can he go to liberate himself from the shackles of societal norms. It has serious overtones. This suggests that despite the use, perhaps overuse, of poetic language in the narrative segments of the drama, the message is neither subtle nor conveyed in a way that hints at multiplicity of meaning. Of course, at the time when the play was written, the angry young men movement was still in vogue. The play has been performed, ever since, on quite a few occasions. On Monday evening, Dark Room, directed by Alee Sheikh, was presented as part of the Theatre Festival at the Arts Council. For some odd reason the actors who were assigned to do the four major characters in the story did not make any worthwhile effort to interpret the text on their own. They followed the dotted line and that’s where the play suffered a great deal.

Siddiqui (Taha Hussain) is a reporter (and we are told that he’s a scandal reporter, whatever that means). He begins the show by telling the audience that his housemate Jamshed (Saad Hassam) is a photographer who takes objectionable pictures and is often found in the dark room where he develops his photos. Soon Kamran (Habib Ullah) makes an entrance. He is a receptionist. Kamran is into a girl, Tina, and thinks a certain Mr Jackson will help him go ‘abroad’. The three talk about the idealism of another friend, Zafar (Fahad Yousuf), an artist who no longer lives with them and has gone back to his village, to his land.

The three friends discuss and squabble about how to make their mark in society and Siddiqui is the one who seems to be more in touch with reality. A little over half an hour into the play Zafar returns to them after an unsuccessful stint in the village. He is constantly bitter about life. Things take a further bad turn when Kamran finds that Mr Jackson and Tina have betrayed his trust. There is also an influential character of ‘Madame’ (whom the audience doesn’t see) associated with Zafar and the three other friends want him to do as the Madame says which may help them improve their status. He doesn’t agree with them. Then there’s the character of a child Ismail (Ahsan), who occasionally turns up in their house and is afraid of a badmash in the locality called Sultan.

It is easy to guess that Dark Room sounds like a long play that Pakistan Television used to run in the 1980s. Regrettably, it is treated like one. The actors are so woody in their expression and so painfully monotonous in delivering their lines that whatever bite and philosophy there is in the script fizzles out in no time. Taha Hussain comes across as a newscaster who doesn’t want to mispronounce a single word and Fahad Yousuf, well, his accent and footwork needed to be worked on… a lot. Unless, he was asked to speak the way he spoke. Then that’s a different thing altogether. Saad Hassam was good in patches.

Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2016