Imran Iftikhar (Member Core Team, Theatre Wallay) reflects on his other-worldly relationship with Lata Mangeshkar I was on a plane when I first heard that Lata had passed away. I wasn’t really shocked – she was 92, had just contracted pneumonia and Covid, and had been on a ventilator for the past few weeks. It was the news that I’d […]
TW Blog
18 posts
The art world has been extremely hard hit by the covid-19 pandemic over the last year and half. Cinemas and theatres have been in darkness and concert halls silent. Performers and artists have found themselves without work, and cultural activity of all kinds has been at a standstill. Under these circumstances, many spaces that lived off the art world have […]
Mr. I.A. Rehman didn’t sound too keen when I called him up, but he couldn’t refuse his friend, and I was learning to be something that didn’t come naturally to me – pushy.
by Adil Yousuf Life goes on. It is the tagline advertisement of modern hope. However, it doesn’t mean that the journey is smooth. This particularly appears true in the case of modern man, the child of enlightenment who lives in the era of buttons, available at his service at the cost of an imposed routine, a life whose success is […]
by Imran Iftikhar About a month and a half ago, I received a WhatsApp notification on Farmers in the Dell, the group which contains the general members of Theatre Wallay. It was a call for a meeting. There are 35 people in that group, a motley collection of different people connected by their love for theatre. Now we are all used […]
By Ali Akbar ANote from Theatre Wallay Theatre Wallay and Rung School of Music and Arts joined hands to start a three-months long acting class. Theatre Wallay conducts the class while Rung School provides logistic and administrative support. It was started as a pilot in February 2019, and will conclude with a theater performance in the last week of June. […]
by Adnan Ahmed Khan It was mid December 2018 when my friend and colleague, Belal, had a sudden urge to run away to Karachi to become an actor. Every break in our work hours would be consumed by discussing how he could become a successful actor. After lots of arguments, he agreed to my proposition that it would be imprudent […]
By Imran Iftikhar Last year [2017], I, along with my theater company, performed at the prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Oregon, USA. It was a play about Pakistan that we had written and were then performing for an American audience. The response was unbelievable. We had a total audience of about 3000 people. We were humbled by the love and […]
by Imran Iftikhar About three years ago, I received a text from Fizza, my former boss at the school where I used to teach. She was also artistic director of a theater company, Theatre Wallay, of which I am a member now. She told me that her company was starting work on a new play, and was wondering if I […]
by Ajmal Hussain Now that the Indian biopic Manto (2018, directed by Nandita Das) has been released in theaters (but banned in Pakistan by Pakistan Censor Board) and is available for streaming, the inevitable comparisons to the Pakistani biopic, also called Manto (2015, directed by Sarmad Sultan Khoosat) have become the topic du jour. Both films are based on the […]