The Rebel

The curtain rises with the poet reciting how he wants to “look at the past,at the ruins where I see names; whose are they? Mine?” The action follows him from the corridors of his college in Lahore through his marriage with Britisher Alys to the prison cell where he is imprisoned. “I dip my fingers into my own blood to write poetry,” he scrawls with charcoal on the prison wall. Kohli adds that there is special emphasis on the Rawalpindi Conspiracy; he spent four years in jail for allegedly planning a coup against the government. “This is the time his poetry became sharper and more revolutionary,” says Kohli,whose library contains “every book by Faiz and almost all prominent ones about him”. For the past few weeks,Bali has dipped into this collection to write his script.

Songs by Faiz have been performed by the likes of Mehdi Hasan,Iqbal Bano,Farida Khanum and Noor Jehan. “This was a challenge because 30 per cent of the play is music,both live and recorded. We did not want famous voices to distract from the action on stage,” says Bali. Another challenge was that the actor Ayub does not resemble Faiz physically. “But he can speak Urdu fluently in a way Faiz would have liked,” he adds. The play,he insists,ends with a message of hope for a better tomorrow. Appropriate for these times for sure.