fter a rehearsal for another play that was being held at the Young Directors Festival in February this year, Hasnain Raza leaned back in what wasn’t quite a comfortable seat and gave his peers some commentary on the day’s work.

“He’s not the director of the play, but he’s brilliant, so we had him watch and time us,” said Hani Taha, who played the lead in a Manhoff adaptation. The owl and the kitty.

As Raza detailed where the actors missed their marks, went too fast, stumbled or hesitated, it was clear that everyone in the room was clinging to his every word. Quite an achievement, for someone in their early twenties.

Raza talked about her own piece for the festival, Namukammal, which he had written himself, and according to him, concerned the things which are not said and the things which we suppose.

Namukammal just completed his five-day recovery at NAPA last weekend and received a standing ovation. It was a good game, but something was missing.

The good things about Namukammal were the components of any good production. The script was sharp, the dialogues intelligent. The actors were really hitting their marks. The lighting was – pardon the very unintended pun – perfect. The stage was used beautifully, dividing the space into different areas which were then lit as needed.

The story was quite interesting for a completely new writer. His maturity as an artist came through his words, however, the rawness of someone who hasn’t experienced many facets of life also came through.

Generally, NAPA accepts all original student submissions if they pass quality checks, although a panel of advisors will suggest improvements and adjustments. In Raza’s case, he was asked to shorten the piece, as well as alter a scene that might have been too vague for the audience to understand.

On the execution side, Namukammal wins all the awards for being produced by a tech-conscious team. NAPA has already produced actors and directors with incredible vision – both Sunil Shankar and Fawad Khan come to mind here, for Equus and Khwab Tha Shayad, their own early productions – but limited resources to do exactly what they wanted, perhaps. While Shankar used sound and music as a very lively part of his productions, Khan tended to dabble in surrealism, managing to do so for the most part, but not entirely.

However, these are the people who have informed and shaped the sensibilities of graduate students now, and are more likely to be open to experimenting and using the tools at our disposal to sketch scenes more realistically.

Theater had become an important, if not huge, part of the entertainment industry in Pakistan over the past decade and a half. It began to offer variety, with everything from an elaborate musical by Nida Butt’s Made For Stage Productions, to outlandish songs and dances by Shah Sharahbeel, to highly original pieces by KopyKat, often written by Anwar Maqsood; to yes, NAPA’s “real theater” plays.

The institution has often drawn criticism for its intellectual approach to the medium, in a country that is mostly entertainment-starved, but is believed to have reached a particular intellectual peak that apparently cannot be surpassed.

Perception is everything, and the general public, if familiar with NAPA, will assume that the work coming out of the institution would be boring, too serious, and not fun. Although a NAPA part cannot compete in terms of sales and marketability, say, Fat Where Pawnay Aug 14, it would be fair to say that these latest productions might not live up to the quality of content and creative execution of a NAPA play. To put it simply, the different schools of theatrical thought in Pakistan are simply not comparable.

However, over the years, it has become apparent that lesser actors get better commercial projects while NAPA students and alumni are relegated to smaller roles, or no roles at all. An interesting thing to note here would be how after performing a series of highly successful plays in Karachi, the director noted that he had to beat the diction and mannerism of his only NAPA-trained actor before he was allowed to to get on stage. When conversing with TV/film actors, the most common phrase whenever NAPA actors are mentioned is: ‘jo dikhta hai wo bikta hai,’ dismissing every institute product as a commercial failure.

When Fawad Khan, actor, director, NAPA alumnus and current Artistic Director of NAPA Repertory Theatre, discusses the misconceptions surrounding NAPA and his work, he is perplexed; which, by the way, is also the name of a play that Khan points to as one of the most modern original works performed by NAPA actors.

“When you say ‘classical approach,’ do you mean classical lyrics or classical execution, because those are two very different things,” says Khan. “And I would like to point out that if we put on a Shakespearian play, we will also do a Puzzled! (original by Imran Yusuf) or a Faraib (adapted from Harold Pinter Treason).”

In the context of this conversation, Khan also points out that Equus and Khwab Tha Shayad were played 10 years ago, and NAPA has done many more since.

The point here to make would be that their reputation precedes them, which is why you might not be tempted to see Waiting for Godot, Sindhi-friendly, on what’s supposed to be a fun Saturday night, but if you did, you’d be pleasantly surprised at the humor and sensitivity that emerges despite the language barrier.

“We are a performing arts institution, and yes, we focus on one medium in particular,” says Khan, “but we also train our students in film, through a course taught by Yamina Peerzada.

Khan ruminates on the idea that some mainstream TV actors have commented on how NAPA actors are unable to handle on-screen acting. “There are so many people who have come out of NAPA to do amazing things,” he says, “Saqib Khan realized Ghabrana Nahi Hai (released recently), Paras Masroor has been on television for quite a few years (parizaad and Dhoop Ki Dewar), Nabeel Qureshi spent two years here; you see NAPA alumni making their mark.

The difference between commercial success and pure acting genius is unfortunately as small as a single eyebrow. Whether we like it or not, we are looking at to things much more, and much more critically than before, and have a huge range of visual comparisons for just about anything from banana bread to dogs to people.

Fawad Khan believes that this lookist culture is to the detriment of the artist.

“Maybe the world should stop being about surface beauty,” he says. “Being presentable is one thing, caring about appearance is another. As an actor, ideally, I’d like to be cast in a range of characters. The most flexible is with the look [required] the more likely you are to not be typecast.

Each year, art and design schools invite members of the advertising and fine arts industries to critique students’ final presentations, which is how many future stars are discovered. A similar marriage between entertainment media and NAPA would be mutually beneficial for both.

Actors and directors who graduate from the institution should be assured that they will find work in their field, on merit of course, while production houses and TV stations will benefit if they hold auditions on campus.