Plays and more!

Naseeruddin Shah's Manto Ismat Hazir Hain, challenged the spaciousness of Shilpakala Vedika as it drew gigantic crowds on the last day of the Times Hyderabad Festival.
As Hyderabad theatre enthusiasts streamed the theatre, both the balcony and the stairway were filled to the brim. The superb acting and inciting content of the play provoked thought and drew applause in equal measure though it did shock a few! Most of the hip, young crowd, stayed till the very end though they did find the urdu dialogue hard to understand in its totality.The play, which merged both theatre and literature, took its material from the writings of Ismat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto-two writers of 1940's writing much before their time. The city's crowd appreciated this literary aspect of the play as the packed house rightly indicated.