Selected Plays

This selection of seven of Shahid Nadeem's plays, published here for the first time in English translations, fully displays the author's dazzling range and ability. Each play is memorably distinct in both subject and treatment, but underlying the variety is a passionate concern with major social issues, especially oppression of women and the poor, and the distorting restrictions of corruption and hypocrisy. Although such subjects could hardly be more serious, Shahid Nadeem always keeps the audience's interest and enjoyment. Indeed, he has placed Pakistan on the theatre map of the world by his originality and skill in interweaving innovative forms with traditional elements such as music and dance, and with liberal quantities of humour. Hypocrites, he shows can be undermined by laughter. Hence the storms of controversy which his plays have roused, whether Dukhini on the trafficking of women from Bangladesh to Pakistan, Bulha on orthodox rejection of the great seventeenth-century Sufi mystic poet Bulleh Shah, or, most recently, the banned Burqavaganza.