T H E AT R E R E V I E W
BANANISTAN
NOT KOPYKATS BEST OFFERING!
D
awar Mahmood and his band of Kopykats have
raised the bar high for theatre in Karachi in general, and Pakistan in particular. They have been
around for more than a decade but teaming up with
veteran playwright Anwar Maqsood gave them a new
lease of life and they became trendsetters with Pawnay
14 August, Aangan Terrha, Sawa 14 August, Haaf Playt
and Siachen to name a few of their plays. Their Dharna
last year was a disappointing effort and it seems that
they elaborated the same idea in Bananistan, their latest offering that damages their reputation big time. Bananistan has a brilliant plot if you ask me and same goes
for the characters used in that plot. There is a Nawaz
Sharif, a Shehbaz Sharif, an Imran Khan, an Altaf Hussain, a Kashmala Tariq, a Qaim Ali Shah, a Sheikh Rasheed, an Asif Ali Zardari and a Fazlur Rehman who all
play actors on stage since its 2030 AD and they are all
out of work due to Martial Law in Bananistan. Not bad
if you consider that they didn’t have the luxury of Anwar
Maqsood as a playwright, Dawar Mahmood as a director and Kopykats regulars Yasir Hussain and others as
members of the cast. The script is the weakest link of
the play here and had the writers not injected the internet memes and jokes in the script, the play would have
done well. Then there was the acting that would prove
to be shocking for the regular audience … you won’t believe that the woman playing Nawaz Sharif’s wife was
also playing Kashmala Tariq; the spot boy (played by
Hasan Raza) and the actress who played the on-stage
director were the biggest disappointments. In fact, the
on-stage director got on many people’s nerves includ-
ing this scribe with her over-the-top acting and singing.
Yes, in Anwar Maqsood’s plays there was no singing
and that’s what made Dawar’s productions different
from the rest. The Disney-inspired singing may have appealed to the Nida Butt-fan club but not to the followers
of Kopykats Productions. The actor who played Qaim
Ali Shah (Shaqat Khan) had the meatiest role but in his
first play for Kopykats in more than 5 years, ‘Shafqi’ tried
to be himself and not the character and that is something he shouldn’t have done. Dawar Mahmood as Imran Khan and Fareeha Raza as Hina Rabbani were the
saving grace of the play and they were aided in their
quest by Saqib Sameer’s Altaf Hussain and the guy
playing Sheikh Rasheed. Mustafa Choudhry is a wonderful actor and it would have been better had his talent
been used constructively rather than asking him to play
Maulana Fazlur Rehman, something he has played on
TV on numerous occasions. On the whole, Bananistan
is a play with potential and one hopes that the director
Tulin Khalid Azim makes the necessary changes to it so
that people with high expectations exit the theatre in a
good mood rather than in a disappointed manner. The
singing has to go and same can be said of the cartoonish sequences where the on-stage producer played by
Mohsin Ejaz strikes the on-stage director with a stick …
that looks good in Road Runner cartoons but not in a
stage play by Kopykats Productions. The play had many
moments where the audience laughed and clapped but
lack of humour and intelligent dialogues left a bad taste
for some, if not many.
7 | BOOM