Doing theatre for children is an arduous task. Other than an engaging script and a lively performance, what characterises theatre for children is its ability to nurture intellectual and artistic talent in the young ones. It also plays a part in their personal development.
Recently shown at the Karachi Arts Council, Ali Baba Chalis Chor could be termed a success only if its main objective were to make children laugh and nothing else. A production of Green Eye Production, the play was based on one of the classic Arabic folktales of “One Thousand and One Nights (),” which is also known as the “Arabian Nights.”
Directed by Umair Rafiq with narration by Zain Qureshi, Ali Baba Chalis Chor was first performed in ‘Bachpan Ke Rung,’ a theatre festival for children held at the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) in Karachi.
This time, Ali Baba Chalis Chor was boastfully staged with a musical and comical twist to make the most popular childhood bedtime story an exciting, fun-based play both for children and adults. And that’s where the trouble began. In the name of fun, the play ended up killing the centuries-old folktale, right from its beginning to the end and that too amidst deafening laughter and repeated clapping of the audience.
As things took place throughout the play, there was neither a real Ali Baba, nor were the infamous forty thieves, as it was merely a hotchpotch of different characters stolen from the original story. In the guise of Ali Baba Chalis Chor, the scriptwriter just hijacked the classic folktale characters to depict a distorted storyline meant to create some silly fun and nothing more.
From the very outset, the performers were pulling faces, turning themselves upside down, jumping and falling off the stage and simply clowning around to entertain the audience, particularly the young ones. If this is what was supposed to be shown to the children, the makers of the play could have produced a totally new story from scratch, instead of messing up with the original tale.
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