eil Simon’s The Odd Couple is a well-known comedy about two divorced men whose sharply different habits make them unlikely flatmates. First performed on Broadway in the mid-1960s, the play has since been adapted for film, television and countless stage productions. Interestingly, it took almost six decades for the creative minds dominating Karachi’s otherwise languid theatre scene to stage an adaptation of The Odd Couple, only for it to arrive for all the wrong reasons.

More’s the pity, despite countless successful cultural reinterpretations of Neil Simon’s classic around the world, this much-publicised production, staged at the self-proclaimed citadel of the arts in this part of the world, succeeded only in making a mockery of both the original play and its own adaptation, or rather, distortion.

The ordeal for theatre lovers began well before the play itself. It started a full half hour after its scheduled time and a ticket costing Rs. 1,500 was not, apparently, enough to gain entry into the theatre hall. Every patron, regardless of age or gender, had to have a wrist stamped by the gatekeepers, even though the ticket had been purchased only moments earlier at the very same window. Inside, things were no better. The auditorium was ill-maintained and musty, its carpet seemingly as old as the hall itself, its portable monobloc chairs offering virtually no legroom. The hall was overcrowded, people were packed like sardines and latecomers were forced to sit in the aisles.

The Odd Couple, the story of two divorced men who live together for a time while grappling with the emotional hardships of separation, offered ample scope for a creative adaptation capable of providing both laughter and a thought-provoking reflection on life after divorce.

What it got instead was a script that mistook crudeness for wit. While the Pakistani adaptation retained the original plot, it was, from the very outset, littered with street jargon and substandard dialogue, including slang expressions that would once have been considered unfit for the stage. While Umar Sharif introduced colloquial street expressions in his plays, they were generally deployed in the service of comedy, to appease a like-minded audience; this production went a step further, leaning on coarser slang and suggestive innuendos that overwhelmed whatever artistic merit the play might otherwise have possessed.

The clearest evidence of that misjudgement came right at the end. As the audience filed out of the hall, I overheard one little girl ask another of her age what ‘halala’ meant, a word the script had planted with deliberate emphasis, under the guise of family entertainment. That single exchange said more about the production’s sense of humour than anything the cast said on stage.

The cast, comprising young performers mostly in their early twenties, did their best with the material they were given, but the production still amounted to a second-rate theatrical display, falling well short of the stage plays of the early 1990s by the likes of Umar Sharif, Shehzad Raza, Liaquat Soldier, Rauf Lala and their contemporaries. At the very least, those productions possessed enough wit to evoke genuine laughter, even if they seldom appealed to more refined literary sensibilities. This one, by contrast, felt hastily executed and was marred by sloppy performances, with almost every actor seemingly shouting at the top of his lungs in a desperate attempt to make an impact.

Possibly, we are now old enough to recognise the subtle nuances of whatever is being staged in the name of comedy these days. Yet, by and large, audiences do not deserve such lowbrow comedy, especially at the city’s premier venue for arts and cultural activities. For a genuine theatre enthusiast with an appreciation for aesthetics and a strong literary sensibility, as was once the norm decades ago, The Odd Couple proved to be less a source of laughter than a cause for concern.