SHAKUNTALA | AT A GLANCE | THE PLAY | CAST AND CREDITS |
| LTG, 7 pm, Sun, 17 Jan Urdu, 90 minutes Director: Zain Ahmed Playwright: Kalidasa |
Abhijñānaśākuntalam tells the story of King Dushyanta who, while on a hunting trip, meets Shakuntala, the adopted daughter of a sage, and marries her. Once he is summoned back to court, Shakuntala, pregnant with their child, inadvertently offends a visiting sage and incurs a curse, according to which Dushyanta will forget all about her until he sees the ring he left with her. Shakuntala goes to meet Dushyanta, but loses the ring and is forced to come away unrecognized. The ring is found by a fisherman who recognizes the royal seal and returns it to Dushyanta, who regains his memory of Shakuntala and sets out to find her. The Director’s Note: Shakuntala is a great love story full of elements that we find repeated in our modern plays, films and television. While being an ancient text, it is remarkably contemporary in the themes that it embodies and shows how deep a people’s cultural memory can be. We at NAPA chose this play as a means to explore some of our cultural conventions about love, sacrifice, fate and the role of God/Gods in human affairs. I have in this production tried to move away from a conventional presentation of the play by focusing on what we felt were the essentials of the text which we then re-interpreted and presented as movement and sound. The aim of this production was to move away from the spoken word and use movement and sound to convey meaning. The production was an exercise in deconstruction and creation for the whole group, that were forced to push their personal boundaries to create something unusual in form and yet so familiar in content. |
Mohsin Ali Kashif Jamal Farhad Ali Rizvi Paras Masroor Syed Mohammad Farhan Saqib Khan Fawad Khan Akbar Islam Maria Rubab Sana Hasan Aimen Tariq Manaal Uroosa Siddiqi Songs' music composed by: Paras Masroor, Aimen Tariq Music composed and performed by: Alan Simon, Ahsan Bari Production Design: Zain Ahmed Translation: Ahmed Himesh Adaptation: Zain Ahmed |