Uditha Devapriya | Sooriya Records

Remembering Henry Jayasena

July 25, 2021 by shamilka

I remember a conversation I had with a budding playwright. This person, a friend of mine and fully conversant in English, was a fanatic when it came to the English theatre here. He followed play after play with interest. His reviews of them were spot on, for the obvious reason that he himself had acted in some of them and hence knew the workings of a “good” play.

We were not talking about the English theatre that day. I admit I’m neither a big follower nor a fan of it. We were instead talking about the Sinhala theatre, and about how a renaissance of sorts was unfolding in it. I put it to him that while Lionel Wendt is still considered the “elite” hall to stage plays, the YMBA and the Lumbini Theatre stage even greater plays which have tapped into local talent in ways no top-end “ivory tower” has or ever will.

It was at that point that we started to talk about Henry Jayasena. It was also at that point that we ended our conversation. The reason was simple, though not easy to bear. This person hadn’t heard of Henry Jayasena. A blank stare was what I got. “Who’s that?” he mouthed.

That was one encounter. Here’s another. This person, a follower of both English-language and Sinhala-language plays, was talking about the state of our theatre today. He agreed with me wholeheartedly that a renaissance was happening. But he had reservations. I pressed him on, wanting to know what it was he was lamenting. He came out with it eventually:

“Few people who follow the English theatre, very few people in fact, know our icons in the Sinhala theatre. What’s all the more sad about this is that most of our Sinhala playwrights were in fact bilingual (and even trilingual), whereas not many of those in the English theatre, except until a long time ago, made even a passing attempt to know and read up on their own language and culture.”

He mentioned Jayasena with unqualified praise.

Henry Jayasena died five years ago. I was quite young back then, but had come to terms with the fact that he would always be “sudu seeya” in my mind. Yes, I had seen Doo Daruwo around that time. Yes, it took some time for me to grapple with the fact that he was a playwright as well. Yes, it also took some time to realise and be burdened with the fact that he was among our greatest icons. His death moved me for this reason.

There is a section in his autobiography, The Play is the Thing, where he recounts to us his first experience with staging a play. This happened while he was a teacher at a school in Dehipe. The play, Janaki (based on the Ramayana), was his first. He tells us just how difficult it was to get the costumes, actors, and guests for the event. The play was staged, however, and turned out to be successful. This is what happened to Jayasena afterwards, in his own words:

“There is a kind of sadness that settles over me at the end of every play. I mean, when all that lovely work is over and there is little to look forward to in the evenings.”

It is the same kind of sadness we all revel in, whenever hard work is done with and the effort put into it has been appreciated by everyone. It’s a burden for anyone, and for Jayasena it would be a burden he would get used to as time passed by and as he rose higher and higher.

Plays weren’t his only “thing”, of course. We celebrate him for those brilliant films he took part in. I always thought that stage actors could never properly adapt to the subtle, natural style which films demanded. Jayasena’s performance as Piyal in Gamperaliya, however, was the exception to this. I remember someone telling me just how effectively he underplayed his part in that film, to the extent where almost all his other roles seemed theatrical and overacted. That’s true. Even in his acclaimed performances, in Dharmasiri Bandaranayake’s Hansa Vilak for example, you can find him consciously trying to rid himself of any theatrical tendency, a tendency to overemphasise gesture and feeling.

So what exactly was the secret to this man, whose life we celebrate today? He had a voice, no doubt. He could register nearly every emotion with it. Perhaps this was shown in the final sequence of Gamperaliya, where, for the first and only time in the entire film, his mood changes and he harshly rebukes Nanda for grieving over her first husband Jinadasa. Perhaps this was also shown in G. D. L. Perera’s Dahasak Sithuvili, where, as a clerk who suspects his girlfriend of carrying an affair with a colleague of his, he practically exemplified and gave light to all our lost loves.

He also had a vast repository of knowledge when it came to the stage. He was at once firmly rooted in his land and with the rest of the world. With a UNESCO fellowship in his arm, he left to Russia and later to England, and from both countries learnt and absorbed much. He also realised, shrewdly perhaps, that imitating what he had studied there was not the way to resuscitate his country’s theatre, which by then was seeking a way out of Sarachchandra’s stylised plays.

Hunuwataye Kathawa, without a doubt, was his masterpiece. It represented him at his peak. Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle had been wildly popular in both Russia and England. In keeping with his style, however, Jayasena refused to slip Brecht’s famous “alienation effect”, which tried to strip a play of its emotional power, into his adaptation of it. The reason was simple: “I had seen enough of dry, spiritless, and embittered productions of Brecht not to commit the same mistake here”. Deliberately and to great acclaim, he included song and dance sequences in Hunuwataye Kathawa, to provoke raw emotion in the audience he wanted to reach.

Perhaps Jayasena taught us a lesson here. He knew the theatre, inside-out. He realised that for all the trends the rest of the world had popularised, he still would have to shape and adapt his stories to suit his own people. He understood that we had our own stories to enrich our theatre with. He also understood that it was not imitation but adaptation which would develop our stage. That this didn’t mean a local playwright should be divorced from the issues of his time was proved by his next play, Apata Puthe Magath Nathe. That’s the closest thing to a political statement Jayasena came up with. It was based on a true incident, was banned, and was later staged to wide acclaim.

But that’s another story.

Meanwhile, have I lost my faith in our theatre? I don’t think so. Icons live. They live in our memory and in the collective memory of an entire nation. This happens even if the snobs and elitists in our midst forget them. This happens even if they neglect and rubbish them. This happens even if they become culturally uprooted and drag some of us into their rootless worlds. There is a reason for this, of course. Not too hard to find.

The truth is, icons are remembered so long as we remember them. So long as what they did, and what they left behind, was done to further the progress of our culture, we will not neglect them. The truth is, so long as they have left something for us to continue, as Henry Jayasena did, we will not cast them to the dust.

My friend there was a snob, though I’m sure he isn’t aware of this. He doesn’t know who Henry Jayasena is, and I know he doesn’t care anyway. Doesn’t matter. If we all could take stock of those we forgot, those we left aside in order to become part of the culturally uprooted, however, then I think we can all mend our ways. Lionel Wendt isn’t for snobs, after all. Nor is it an ivory tower. The English theatre continues to bloom, rightly. The Sinhala theatre continues to be reborn, again rightly. We have Henry Jayasena to thank for it. Those who have forgotten him, happily, are in a minority. I am glad. I know we all are.

Written for: Ceylon Today ESCAPE, November 11 2014

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Swineetha Weerasinghe: Reflections on an open canvas

July 10, 2021 by shamilka

Swineetha Weerasinghe, Uditha Devapriya

There’s a sequence of overpowering lyrical rawness in Welikathara where the protagonist and his wife fight over each other’s pasts; it transforms the plot from a terse, Cape Fear-esque thriller to something pulpier, taking us back to the whodunit potboilers of the forties and the fifties. That sequence was only partly there in the restored version, shown about two months ago to a indifferent audiences at the Regal in Colombo, because the first few scenes in it had (for some reason) been cut off. Unfolding after our protagonist, Wickrema Randeniya (Gamini Fonseka) gets taunted by Goring Mudalali (Joe Abeywickrema), those scenes depict Randeniya’s wife, Geetha, angry that her husband has done nothing to get rid of the villain, ominously rejecting his advances. In that act of rejection, the film reaches its climax, and inadvertently betrays its pulpiness.

This encounter between wife and husband is so claustrophobically shot, with two frames cutting into each other, that owing to its overwhelming CinemaScope format (the first time it was used in South Asia) you almost cynically WANT them to continue bickering, building up the tensions until Randeniya does the only thing a character played by Gamini Fonseka, at that point in his career, could do to assert himself: slap the wife and, with the sense of shame it compels in him, project his anger against the antagonist of the story. Fonseka of course met his match with Goring in Welikathara (it’s a testament to how provocatively and refreshingly novel Joe Abeywickrema was that after one point we don’t root for the hero, we root for him), but that conflict would never have intensified without Geetha. She needed to be depicted in such a way that in the first half she symbolises obedience and respect, and in the second contempt and hatred.

Played by Swineetha Weerasinghe, she embodied both rather well. That has as much to do with the script, by Tissa Abeysekara, as it has with her ability, because the truth is that Swineetha, whom I met several years ago, has always been an intriguing actress, capable of enormous sensitivity without the stereotypes that such artists are forced into. The greatest tribute to the range of emotions and experiences she could evoke, I think, was H. D. Premaratne’s Sikuruliya, where she was transformed from a village damsel, in love with Vijaya Kumaratunga, to a hapless, unhappily married wife of a cruel, dwarfish aristocrat, played by Bandula Galagedara, and then to the fiancée of a considerably older man, a ruffian, played by Joe. Coming right after Welikathara, Sikuruliya was also a massive success, and it too was shot and screened on CinemaScope. In both we saw Swineetha up-close, and in both we were moved by her complexity.

Swineetha’s career belongs to a twilight period, the sixties, coming right after Rukmani Devi was acknowledged as the queen of our cinema and before Malini Fonseka became her successor. It was an intermittent period, in which our actresses were taken to portray ordinary women who went about their lives without the need to attract, to be heroic. Swineetha was not alone here, but unlike those other actresses who entered the cinema during that intermittent period (especially Punya Heendeniya) she projected an at-times ambiguous attitude to the patriarchal world she was filmed against. In the movies of Robin Tampoe (her first screen credit was in a dance item in Suhada Divi Piduma, in 1962, followed by three successive pictures: Sudu Sande Kalu Wala in 1963; Samajaye Api Okkoma Samanai in 1964; and Sudo Sudu, which paired her with Gamini Fonseka, in 1965) she found her niche, as the village damsel who possesses agency and does not genuflect unconditionally before male dominance. As Chitra in Delovak Athara, her first serious outing, she expanded on this quality of hers, dangling between friendliness and hostility with respect to her relationship with the protagonist, Nissanka Wijesinghe.

I once asked Swineetha to list out the names of some actresses she looked up to at that point in her career, after Delovak Athara proved that she could reckon with both commercial and serious movies, and she did: Glenda Jackson, Geraldine Chaplin, Rita Tushingham. It’s farfetched to suggest that this is enough for us to understand her élan but then again these actresses were, and continued to be, symbolic of a new woman, the kind that defied cosmetic innocence for independence, autonomy, defiance. Swineetha’s characters, especially from the late sixties, embodied these values.

In a way her biography offers some clues as to this contradictory streak in her. Swineetha was born to a middle class family in Dehiwela. Her father had been a gunman in the British Army; her mother remained a housewife. Educated initially at Buddhist Girls’ College in Mount Lavinia (until the Fifth Standard) and later at Dehiwela Madya Maha Vidyalaya, she proved herself by winning awards for singing, dancing, athletics, and netball. “I was never interested in acting as a career,” she informed me, “But I was interested in medicine. More specifically, indigenous medicine.” Resolving for a career in that field, therefore, she enrolled herself at the Government Indigenous Medical College. She never completed it; during her third year she read an advertisement calling for budding actresses, received some flak from her mother and encouragement from her father, answered it, and got the role: in that dance item in Suhada Divi Piduma.

Lester James Peries noticed her in Sudo Sudu, which marked one of Robin Tampoe’s rare forays into serious territory (that it failed, as Tissa Abeysekara later wrote, indicated how unfamiliar that serious territory was for him), “borrowed” her from RT Studios (“Because they weren’t ready to just hand over an actor like her to a director like me who was defying their system,” Lester recounted to me years ago, chortling), and cast her in Delovak Athara in a role meant for the much younger Anula Karunatilake. Ironically, she had begun her career with commercial, mainstream movies, but returned to them only briefly thereafter, preferring the more serious ventures that would get her travelling to various film festivals: to Tashkent (where she met Simi Garewal, Sunil Dutt, Nargis, and Shabana Azmi) and Krakow with Welikathara, and to Tehran (where she met the Shah of Iran and, on his last day before departure, Satyajit Ray) with Hulavali.

Most actresses, as they age, tend to turn themselves into the matriarchs they used to defy in their younger days. It happened with Malini Fonseka; it happened in a more nuanced way with Punya Heendeniya (the difference between her Nanda in Gamperaliya and Kaliyugaya attests to that); and it has happened, to a certain extent, even with that most defiant of onscreen women, Swarna Mallawarachchi (as Age Asa Aga shows). In their younger days they cried over the men they fantasised about; when they mature and grow wiser they cry when other women fantasise about their husbands. They enthralled us by their sense of daring; now they enthral us by their realisation of how hollow their youthful streak was. It’s a testament to Swineetha’s capability that she has undergone this shift without the usual blasts of emotions that accompany it. Perhaps it’s because of how subtle her acting is, or perhaps it’s because no one has filmed her or made use of her capabilities since the eighties. Either way, you can’t place any of her characters against a specific canvas. They are blissfully pliable, ambivalent, and multidimensional.

There have, of course, been other actresses, who came during that twilight period I wrote about earlier: Punya, Anula Karunatilake, Swarna Kahawita, Sobani Amarasinghe. But while they either yielded to their fates in their stories or defied them altogether to their cost, Swineetha’s characters don’t let us know immediately as to what they are feeling and which side of this divide they are on. In Delovak Athara she is, in several sequences, infuriated with Nissanka when Nissanka is calm and (inexplicably) cheerful when he is for obvious reasons frightened. This refreshingly contradictory quality of hers is what adorns almost every performance, no matter how good or bad her films seem today. I think the reason for that is that she wasn’t prolific the way that Malini or even Swarna was: she chose her scripts meticulously. A prolific player tends to accept roles that pigeonhole him or her; a more selective player tends to go for roles that he or she is comfortable with. Swineetha is, I believe, a living embodiment of this strange paradox.

And in the end that’s why she’s able to symbolise both submission and rebellion. In Welikathara she literally cradles her husband, comparing him to their soon-to-be-born baby. A couple or so sequences later, however, she has begun to feel so betrayed by his attitude of appeasement towards Goring Mudalali that she contorts her earlier feelings to spurn his very manhood. It’s a call for defiance, a statement almost, but he gets it, the same way Nissanka gets it by facing his conscience and Vijaya Kumaratunga, Bandula Galagedara, and Joe Abeywickrema get it by discerning their inadequacies: with the realisation that beneath her sense of simplicity are strong undercurrents of individuality and agency. That’s where she triumphs: you never actually get her, because she prefers to reveal her characters, not in gushes and torrents, but in a more nuanced, less explicit way.

Written for: Daily Mirror, November 23 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

By way of tribute to Bandula Vithanage

June 26, 2021 by shamilka

Bandula VIthanage, Uditha Devapriya

Shakespeare is universal. Indeed, he may have been the world’s first truly universal artist. That’s hardly a contestable fact. But transposing him to another setting, and in the process spilling half his essence in the dust, is formidable. It cannot be done. Lesser men have given up. Nonetheless, from among those who tried and tested this incomparable writer in their native background, there were those who succeeded. They were rare. This week we mourned the passing away of one of these rare gems. By way of tribute even, we can hardly repay, or even for that matter measure, the debt we owe to him. Bandula Vithanage, one of the Sinhala theatre’s most treasured icons, is no more.

Language and literature are not clean different. They are interconnected in ways few would dare dispute. The problem with Shakespeare, and indeed with many other playwrights, is that, sans his text and idiom, it is difficult to convey to any audience his outlook. This is a problem endemic to every language. Translation in a way castrates the essence of any text. What Bandula Vithanage did was to strip his translations of any dogmatic tendency towards embracing the vernacular while neglecting the Bard’s locale. No-one who had the privilege of seeing his Venisiye Velenda (The Merchant of Venice), as I did, can deny that. But I’m getting myself a little too ahead here.

Venisiye Velenda (The Merchant of Venice)

Bandula Vithanage was born in 1940, at a time when the world had spurned colonialism and countries were striving to reclaim lost identities. Educated initially at a school at Athuruwella, in Bentota, and later at Carey College Colombo, young Vithanage completed his A/Levels at Dharmasoka College Ambalangoda. While his primary education had been in English, he opted for Sinhala in his later studies, a curious anomaly which opened to him the best of both languages. He revelled in this twilight, bilingual world, and his interest in the theatre was furthered by his encounter with Shakespeare. Later, at Colombo University, he came under the influence of Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra. Here, arguably, he achieved a near-complete fusion of East and West, creating the base on which his later career would rest.

Not surprisingly, he began his career as dramatist with a translation: a play by Harold Pinter. He began associating himself with Sugathapala de Silva, then an unabashed critic of Professor Sarachchandra’s stylized plays, and Simon Navagaththegama, the novelist and playwright. Through de Silva he began his association with another Shakespeare aficionado, Tony Ranasinghe. Meanwhile, of course, a whole spate of plays continued, both translations and originals. These attempts all won award and accolade, with his debut, Gangawak Sapaththu Kabalak saha Maranayak (written by Navagaththegama) gaining two State Drama Festival awards.

To those who thought that an art medium transposed to another setting must be stripped of all its foreign accretions, Bandula Vithanage was an unforgivable rebel. His translations of Thornton Wilder (Senehabara Dolly, Hiru Dahasa) and Jean Anouilh (Becket) were “vernacular” in their language only: in pretty much everything else, the “background” was decidedly Western. This didn’t seem to trouble him, though, and we see the legacy of this anomaly in productions of foreign plays even today.

Every playwright has his baptism of fire, his vigil. Vithanage met his with Shakespeare. His friendship with Tony Ranasinghe resulted in the first “real” translation of the Bard, with Venisiye Velenda. It was first staged in 1980, at a time of deep social revolt. Shakespeare seems to have struck ground with him, when, in a 2009 interview, he admitted that the Bard could influence and indeed had influenced the Sinhala theatre. That’s true. Shakespeare was not foreign to Sri Lanka the same way Brecht had been. Henry Jayasena had brought Brecht to our country; Shakespeare, however, had been with us since the days of Nurti and John de Silva. What Vithanage did, however, was to make available to a lay audience, with no music or melodrama (as was the case with John de Silva), Shakespeare in a local backdrop. That he succeeded is in a large part due to his early schooling and childhood interest in foreign plays.

More were to follow, of course: there were translations of Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and A Comedy of Errors. They all won him accolades, none of which could ever hope to measure the ripples in Sinhala theatre he had created.

Then there were his stints at the cinema. Like all thespians deeply rooted in the stage, he exhibited a distaste for the film medium. But he joined it nonetheless. There were roles in Ahas Gawwa, Viragaya, Mathu Yam Davasa, and a whole lot more. There were also stints at television, which is how I first got to see him. But nothing could compare with the stage for him: “I hardly read novels,” he once remarked, “mostly plays.” The only way he could have summed his interest up. It hardly needs to be added that he rarely, if at all, watched films in his childhood. Plays occupied his entire time. The stage was his vindication, an entire vista justifying his career, illustrious as it was.

Looking back, it seems difficult to put down in two or three sentences what more than 30 years accomplished. Writers can do scant justice to monuments, after all. The Bard left us almost 400 years ago. His legacy seems indomitable enough. What Bandula Vithanage, and indeed those who followed him in school productions and elsewhere, did was to bring that legacy closer to home. The Bard had hitherto been mainly confined to Dramsoc and Nurti. Vithanage ensured that Shakespeare need not be open to only those who enjoyed the perks of English education. He also ensured, however, that this did not lead to the Bard’s language being castrated in the process of revealing his magic to a lay audience.

A long time it has been since he caught us unawares with Venisiye Velenda. A much longer time it has been since Dramsoc fell apart in the wake of people like Sarachchandra and the 1956 cultural revolt. Much has happened. We can never pay back Bandula Vithanage for what he unleashed. The greatest tribute to be paid to him, I think, is by immortalizing his legacy. “How?” you may ask. By ensuring that what he unleashed is not contorted, narrowed, or constricted in the pursuit of short-term profit or pleasure. I am sure you will agree.

Written for: Ceylon Today LATITUDE, September 7 2014

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Malini Fonseka: The girl grows up

June 13, 2021 by shamilka

Malini Fonseka, Uditha Devapriya

The line between emotional authenticity and contrived melodrama has been so thin that even our best actors can’t resist crossing it. If it’s surprising to come across Ranjan Ramanayake in as atypical a performance as the youngest son in Awaragira, or the father to the Gautama Buddha in Siddhartha Gautama, it’s not because we doubt their ability in both the commercial and the serious cinema, but because he (and others like him) have not been given a proper outlet to be flexible in that sense. This is roughly true of every film industry which lacks a solid base: some actors make it and adapt, others remain more or less limited. In Rukmani Devi we come across the former of these. She remained, to her last, a veritable queen, but she retained a certain welter of conviction. After her we come across another monarch in Gamini Fonseka. After Gamini Fonseka we come across our cinema’s first real queen, Malini Fonseka.

In the two Fonsekas we see a bifurcation of the sensibilities that nurtured Rukmani Devi, between our need for a hero and our need for a heroine. It’s certainly not true that Gamini and Malini represented a synthesis of aesthetic sensibilities when they were cast together (whether in a commercial outing like Hondata Hondayi or a more serious outing like Nidhanaya) because Malini was the first actor here able to make herself the only destined woman to whatever man she was paired with. If one imagines her equally adept in front of not just Gamini, but also Tony Ranasinghe, Joe Abeywickrama, Vijaya Kumaratunga, and the later generation of Amarasiri Kalansuriya, Ravindra Randeniya, and Lucky Dias, it’s because, as Asoka Handagama pointed out in a Facebook status, her characters were conceived to enrapture the male protagonist. They existed almost solely for this reason.

Malini was the idealised female, the fetishized woman. Even in the worst film concocted here, she gave a decent performance, and in all her performances, she made every man who came across her desire her. Directors who realised this tapped into the box-office potential of their movies, not by pairing her with the two biggest names in the country (Gamini and Vijaya), but by separating her from the characters they played. In K. A. W. Perera’s Wasana Vijaya’s character croons Jothipala: “Oba Langa Inna” was that film’s distillation of this quality in Malini’s lovers. Separation they say makes the heart grow fonder. This was the underlying philosophy in Wasana and later, in H. D. Premaratne’s Apeksha. Malini not only made us want her, she also made us go to any lengths to have her. It’s difficult to think of any other actress here who could equal her in this respect, because her directors understood where her forte lay.

That explains why she was never really a femme fatale. The closest to such a character that she got to was the unsullied heroine in Sasara Chethana, which she herself directed and which had her intertwine the Western with the fairy-tale-like theme of forced separation at childhood. But even there she was unsullied, whose sense of chastity was so calculated and yet fresh. Her most distinctive features – the sleek, flowing hair (which she uses in Sasara Chethana to fight a villain), the shy, contained, but genuine smile, and the beguiling, yet careful eyes – helped her in this regard. Some of her most memorable commercial outings in the seventies – the films of K. A. W. Perera, for instance – personifies her as a doll: fragile, defiant, tempestuous. In Sahanaya (directed by J. Selvarathnam) she’s paired with Gamini, but their roles are somewhat inverted: she is the spoilt heiress; he is the idealist who paints her, and compels her to slap him angrily when she finds out. Sequences like that abound in many of her films, but they are always intermittent, and always there for a reason: to ensnare the man closer to her.

If there’s an almost naive sense of self-discovery in her first roles it’s because that’s what she echoes in real life. A biographical sketch would help us here. Malini Senehelatha Fonseka was born on April 30, 1947 in Peliyagoda as the third child of a family of 11 siblings. She was educated, firstly in Nugegoda, later at Gurukula Maha Vidyalaya in Kelaniya, where she met and befriended some of her later collaborators: Wimal Kumar da Costa (a classmate), H. D. Premaratne, and Donald Karunaratne. Gurukula bordered on the Vidyalankara Campus (now the University of Kelaniya), and got her involved in the theatre. One day some students from Vidyalankara came over looking for an actress to play the lead role: a problem because the University had no women, only boys and monks. The dancing teacher at Gurukula considered Malini, asked her, and after she got permission from her family, acted in it. That play, Noratha Ratha, was written and directed by H. D. Werasiri, and marked the first time she had acted outside school.

In 1965 she took part in a play titled Akal Wessa, which won for her a Best Actress Award and got her the attention of two members in the audience who were looking for a newcomer to play the leading female character in an upcoming film. Tissa Liyanasuriya and Joe Abeywickrama unanimously chose her for her intense subtlety. Remembering his choice many decades later to me, he had this to say: “Some people thought she was thin and rather unsuitable for my film, that she was untried. Joe was satisfied with her though, and so was I.” Punchi Baba marked Malini’s first foray into the cinema. Of her encounters aboard it Liyanasuriya had this to say: “I didn’t order her around. She seemed fully involved.” That sense of being involved and committed was what coloured her career in the seventies, but in these first few performances (including her second role, as the distraught sister to an obsessed elder brother, played by Henry Jayasena, in Dahasak Sithuvili) she was still naive: more the girl next door than the girl of your heart.

You see Malini shedding this avatar from her through her first serious roles, particularly Akkara Paha, where she’s the sister to another obsessed, introspective brother, played by Milton Jayawardena. In Dahasak Sithuvili she more or less succumbs to the quirks and fits of temper of Henry Jayasena, but here she’s more assured, more assertive. By the time she was featured in Nidhanaya, which was the culmination of all those commercial outings that paired her with Gamini Fonseka, she was fully aware of her own parameters: she has let go of being the girl next door, in other words. This was true especially of Siripala saha Ranmenika, which had her opposite Ravindra Randeniya, as well as the films of Dharmasena Pathiraja: from a minor role (again, as a sister) in Ahas Gawwa to the titular role in Eya Dan Loku Lamayek, and to Bambaru Avith and Pathiraja’s understated masterpiece, Soldadu Unnahe. Soldadu Unnahe, however, lacks conviction on her part, because she’s a prostitute, cast against type: consequently, despite her outbursts and tempestuousness, despite that ending where she is poignantly taken away, she is as convincing (if you can put it that way) as Swarna Mallawarachchi in Anjana.

It’s a sign of her personal tastes perhaps, but when I ask her as to what her favourite film is, she first thinks for a while and replies, “Aradhana.” This film, directed by Vijaya Dharma Sri, has Ravindra Randeniya befriend her and then, pushed by guilt and infatuation, come back to reclaim her. His character here is almost like his character from Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Dadayama, and in fact the entire film inverts Obeyesekere’s (even though the latter was released three years after Aradhana) to compel a happy resolution. That it was screened in the eighties, and in colour, is not a coincidence, because Malini admits that those were her favourite years (the years which saw her rise from a player to a director: Sasara Chethana in 1984, Ahinsa in 1987, Sthree in 1991, Sandamala in 1994. All these thematise femininity: frail, open to abuse, but always well meaning and vindicated. Sthree is an attempt at universalising the female experience by drawing a parallel between her character’s travails and those of a newly reared cow.

As the years went by, it seemed as though she took on increasingly matriarchal roles, as evidenced by her acclaimed performances in Punchi Suranganawi (2002), Wekanda Walauwwa (2003), and Ammawarune (2006). It would be unforgivable to omit her role in Prasanna Vithanage’s Akasa Kusum (2009) here, and I think it merits much more than a cursory glance. She won her quite a number of awards internationally, including the Silver Peacock at the Indian Film Festival (which she herself called the “biggest achievement in my forty years” in the cinema). The role was that of a former film star whose return to fame is marked by scandal. In hindsight, perhaps Prasanna Vithanage was spot-on for having chosen her to play the character. Echoing the “fading film star” motif which has figured in countless films in the West, the film delved into the patriarchal “despotism” at the heart of our country and our entertainment industry.

Silver Peacock award of Best Performance-Akasa Kusum (39th IFFI)

One can spot out a kind of naked austerity in Malini’s performance. There are no attempts at exaggerating: here, more than in any of her previous films, she achieves a deliberate underplaying on her part. This underplaying is essential for her character of Sandya Rani, whose nostalgic reveries of the past are underscored by a harsh, all-too real present. The clash of personal feeling and class/social realities (especially when she gets involved in the scandal the movie centres on) is the epicentre of the narrative, and she epitomises this clash succinctly. Suffice it to say that it represents the achieving of an overarching goal Malini’s career has revolved around: the removal of the theatrical and the excessively emotional from her acting. She was earlier the girl next door; now she has become the woman next door, all too aware of the rift between fantasy and reality. Malini Fonseka’s career has been, in that sense, an attempt at self-discovery. In this phase of her career, it seems as though that she has completed her course in that respect.

Written for: Daily Mirror, December 14 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Nita Fernando and the parameters of fame

May 22, 2021 by shamilka

Nita Fernando, Uditha Devapriya

Before she and her husband left for and settled down in Canada, before she cut short what was considered to be a promising film career, only to return to it almost 20 years later, Nita Fernando exuded and exemplified a freewheeling, idealistic, innocent girlishness that no other actress here could really match. You see this girlishness, and the naïveté of idealism, crop up in her two best performances from her first phase: in K. A. W. Perera’s Wasana (one of her first hits) and Vijaya Dharma Sri’s Duhulu Malak (which marked her breakthrough). It’s a testament to how serious she was about her portrayals that these two directors and movies never succumbed completely to the tropes of the commercial cinema, especially Duhulu Malak. Probably that’s why and how Nita’s girlish idealism caught us so quickly, and immediately.

A brief biographical sketch might help us understand this phase of her career. Nita was born in Katuneriya in Chilaw and was educated at Holy Family Convent, Wennapuwa, where she took part in stage dramas that inculcated in her a love to “go out there, to perform, to show my face to the world” as she memorably put to me once. Chilaw at the time had a veritable performing arts centre (a “Kala Ayathanaya”) and this she joined right after leaving school. But like most people from her generation, and the generations that preceded hers, she didn’t want to enter the cinema. She wanted to be a stage actress. Naturally then, her entry to the film industry was accidental, having been selected to act opposite Gamini Fonseka in Parasathumal, but having had to give the offer up because of her parents’ disapproval. One thing led to another, though, and she found herself in R. T. Studios, headed by the formidable Robin Tampoe (who had earlier groomed and initiated Swineetha Weerasinghe).

But it wasn’t Tampoe’s films that she was featured in. It was K. A. W. Perera’s, with Wasana and Lasanda, followed by Sathischandra Edirisinghe’s Rajagedara Parawiyo. By the end of her first 10 years in the industry she had taken part in more than 40 movies, most of them forgettable and a few of them notable. Those few – including Wasana and Rajagedara Parawiyo, as more than a secondary player – got her noticed by Vijaya Dharma Sri, who selected her for his Duhulu Malak. Partly (and crudely) inspired by Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Duhulu Malak was touted by contemporary critics and even audiences as being ahead of its time. It was a deeply sensitive production, and its theme – the immutability of love and of the family institution – was rather controversial. In it Nita was the wife (to Tony Ranasinghe, who became a lifelong friend) as well as the lover (to Ravindra Randeniya, who like Nita was cast in his breakthrough role). The controversy of the theme notwithstanding, I find the morality of Duhulu Malak rather muddled up, if not confusing, and I discern that in Nita’s astute, idealistic, but naively ecstatic portrayal of Nirupa Suraweera.

While vaguely reminiscent of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Dharma Sri’s film repudiates the sexual indifference of Lawrence’s novel and instead uses the theme of adultery, not to emancipate the woman at the heart of the love triangle (caught between the husband and the lover, Nirupa can only confess to her close friends, who while sympathetic implore her to choose wisely), but to affirm the family institution she wants to get out of. The husband is characterised solidly: busy but caring, indifferent but infatuated. Not even two song-and-dance sequences that show this conflict between family ties and personal feelings (“Bonda Meedum” and “Ran Kenden”) are, in my opinion, enough to set aside the forced, contrived morality of the script, and Nita’s lovable, doll-like fragility, threatened most poignantly in that last sequence where the husband imagines shooting and killing her, serves to compound this self-contradictory morality. In the end Dharma Sri resorts to depicting the husband as an irrational, angered cry-baby and the lover as a careless playboy who refuses to give up, and despite the confused morality of the plot, the only strong character who comes out is Nirupa herself. On her hinges the thin line between personal feelings and familial obligations, and she finally chooses, not the former, but the latter.

The strength of a film like Duhulu Malak comes from the solidity of its characters, and all three characters – the wife, the husband, the lover – were depicted squarely, with enough complexity to make them seem less the types they could have been and more the fleshed out individuals they were: Nita as the girlish idealist; Tony as the condescending husband who learns to care more for his woman; and Ravindra as the almost boyish prodigal who only at the end learns to grow up. (His final act, of throwing his shoe to the sea, is a contrivance by the script to make us forget everything that preceded it, but in that act we see him mature: he’s no longer a rabid, obsessive stalker, but a youthful idealist who’s lost his love.) And perhaps it’s the writer in me, but in her performance I see in Nita the schoolgirl aspiring to be a star. I put to her that even in Duhulu Malak, we come across a woman beset with little to no problems, who isn’t but should be content with her station in life, and who, even in the most mundane pursuits, displays a naive and innocent attitude to the world around her. She agreed and replied, “When I was a girl, I wanted to be an actress because I wanted I wanted to act in everything. And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING.”

That Duhulu Malak was her breakthrough was confirmed by the fact that she left the country, with her husband Elias, soon after production wrapped up, and that when she returned 18 years later she was taken in for qualitatively different roles. “I didn’t even get to read reviews of the movies I had acted in, after I departed. I regretted that very much and I complained frequently. But Elias was a very understanding man. Very down to earth, in fact. He got me acquainted with the issues and the problems people from that part of the world, especially expatriates like us, faced.” Perhaps those experiences account for her transformation from the girlish idealist to a self-conscious, responsible woman, exemplified most vividly in her first outing after her return to Sri Lanka in Prasanna Vithanage’s Pawuru Walalu. Again cast as a woman (the widowed Violet) caught between personal feelings and familial obligations, Nita nevertheless tempered her performance and became more vividly and solidly realised.

Vithanage’s films, with one or two notable exceptions, delve into a rigid but textured Catholicised worldview, teetering between guilt and pleasure. That confused morality in Duhulu Malak, therefore, doesn’t quite come out in Pawuru Walalu, especially since in the former the transgression of moral boundaries is depicted flippantly, almost casually, as an innocent interlude on the part of the woman, whereas in the latter it provokes a crisis of faith in both the woman and her daughter (Sangeetha Weeraratne), along with her closest friends (at one point, in a Church, she admits to a friend that she has become a sinner), which not even a poignant ending can resolve. That Nita’s portrayal was more fleshed out was confirmed when she won the Best Actress Award at the 11th International Film Festival in Singapore. Pawuru Walalu was a landmark for her for another reason: it was the first movie she produced. To a considerable extent, this opened her to the cinema in ways that her acting career had not, as she herself put it: “The art of making movies is more difficult, yet more rewarding, than the art of acting in them. I am not belittling my earlier career, but the truth was that I was able to finance films which appealed to my conscience and my priorities.”

I have unfortunately not seen this phase of her career completely, apart from a few performances in serious forays like Saroja and Bambara Walalla, the latter of which she produced. In Saroja she comes out as the most complex character in the story, as the mildly racist yet concerned wife to the protagonist, an idealistic schoolteacher (Janaka Kumbukage),who decides to shelter the daughter of a LTTE soldier. At times her maternal instincts for the forlorn girl conquer her, while at others she pushes her husband to give in to what the villagers want: force the girl away. It’s an inversion of all her previous roles, because she’s likeable and dislikeable and also because in that act of being both at the same time she’s easier to relate to. As for Bambara Walalla, as the mother she occupies less screen time, but the intensity of her portrayal comes out. In any case, her penchant for serious, socially conscious themes were articulated in every film she had a hand in shaping – patriarchy in Nisala Gira, societal violence in Bambara Walalla, and the stigma of AIDS in her latest production, Swara, which clinched awards at the Jaipur Film Festival two years ago.

I sincerely believe Nita has done what she can to make us aware of certain things. Important things. We’d be indifferent not to acknowledge the performances she’s dished out to us, and more pertinently, the films she’s financed out of a desire to propagate pressing issues. She herself affirms what she’s done with a reference to her faith: “I don’t think God says, ‘Go to church and pray all day, and everything will be fine.’ For me, God says, ‘Go out and make a change, and I’ll be there to help you’.”

Written for: Daily Mirror, December 14 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Remembering (the other) Mercy Edirisinghe

May 8, 2021 by shamilka

Mercy Edirisinghe, Uditha Devapriya

Berty Gunathilake turned 92 last week. Berty, those who listened to Radio Ceylon and those fortunate enough to watch television when it first came to Sri Lanka, was one of three humorists who made us laugh without contorting or inverting our sense of humour, the other two being Samuel Rodrigo and Annesley Dias. They helped us imagine what they talked about and what they joked about so much that when they exited the wireless and entered television, they made that transition as smooth as possible. They didn’t lose their touch, as lesser comedians are wont to. That was true also for those other humorists who joined the trio in their sketches.

No, this is not an article on Berty, Annesley, or Samuel. This is an article on one of other humorists who joined them. Mercy Edirisinghe.

Mercy also could make us laugh. For most of her career, that’s what she did. She ended up portraying stereotypes and funny ones at that. She helped us conjure an image of that stereotype and in the end, it remained virtually hers. Moreover, that image she helped create entranced others so much that they tried to imitate her, with little to no success. Just as well, I suppose, because there were times when she made us believe that she was born to play her signature role: the caustic and posh lady figure, who more often than not meant well but who, owing to certain prejudices and snobberies on her part, could rarely transcend her narrow attitude to the outside world.

But this wasn’t all. Mercy wasn’t just a thespian. She didn’t just dub. She had a career of her own in the cinema, miles away from her signature role perhaps, but considerable nevertheless. They showed up a different actor, one who was capable of dramatic roles so much that no less a figure than Sugathapala de Silva once observed, “ඇය කළ රංගනයන් ගායනයන් වර්තමානයේ අයට ඉගෙන ගන්නට හොඳ තක්ෂලාවක් බඳුය” (loose translation: “Her acting and singing are good lessons for aspiring actors today.”) Silva, from what I’ve heard, wasn’t wont to giving blank cheques. He would have meant what he said.

Mercy Edirisinghe was born in Ambepussa on December 18, 1946. She was the third in a family of nine (by her own admission, the most stubborn). Her father, Don Lorenzo Elvin, worked at the Department of Examinations. Her mother was a housewife and a God-fearing Christian, whose devotion to Christ was almost an obsession. Her husband, Lalith Kotelawala, a Buddhist hailing from Kalutara, predeceased her. They had no children.

She officially entered her career in 1964, when she won a contest organised by Radio Ceylon. Two years later she made her debut, in Walikala Rathna’s Ugurata Hora Beheth. The almost farcical name of that play was a prophecy of sorts: although her subsequent roles were all dramatic, they hinged on humour, predicting as they did her later metamorphosis into a humorist. To this end, in her earliest plays – Ran Kanda, Seelavathi, Vishwa Sundari – she managed to develop what would become her biggest asset: her voice, which hovered between naiveté and sophistication.

M. V. Balan gave Mercy her debut in the cinema with his Hitha Honda Minihek in 1975. By then of course, the cinema had changed and, given our socio-political context, comedy had veered off in favour of directors who took up sharper, more politically sensitive themes. Among these directors was Vasantha Obeyesekere, who noticed Mercy and picked her for supporting roles. Soon enough, she was there in Walmath Uwo (alongside Tony Ranasinghe, Somasiri Dehipitiya, and Namel Weeramuni) and in Diyamanthi (where she is the wife to Dehipitiya’s character, a petty criminal just released from prison who discovers that she’s given up on marriage life with him).

I believe Obeyesekere recognised her dramatic potential. With a pair of eyes that tried hard to hide emotion and feeling and with a face that betrayed probably a fraction of the twists and turns of emotion it held back, she was the ideal actor to play out women who were sexually frustrated and unhinged. It was this which came out almost shockingly in Palagetiyo, arguably Obeyesekere’s most naturalistic film (in terms of its depiction of class conflict). To date, I’m willing to bet, it remains her best role. That is why it compels more than a footnote here.

Palagetiyo is about the conflict between idealism and reality, between sentimental romance and class hierachies. The story of Kusum (Dammi Fonseka), the daughter of a rich mudalali (Henry Jayasena) and Sarath (Dharmasiri Bandaranayake), a village peasant’s (educated) son who works for the mudalali, is told through a series of letters the one sends to the other in the first half of the film, with Mercy Edirisinghe (portraying Kusum’s cousin) as the intermediary. The cousin eventually reads those letters, begins to envy their clandestine affair, and dreams of her own escapades with Sarath. Kusum, however, is taken as the prettier and more delicate woman, and the cousin’s attempts at winning him are futile. She hence precipitates their tragedy: by telling them on Kusum’s father, who immediately fires Sarath.

There’s a sequence in Palagetiyo which haunts me whenever I see it. At a time when trysts and sexual affairs were all but completely tabooed in our films, Obeyesekere shows us an encounter between the two. Being the razor-sharp editor he always was, he uses the encounter to illustrate the tension between them and the cousin, and that by constantly cutting it to the feelings of jealousy and spite evident on the latter’s face as she lays awake and as she imagines Sarath and Kusum making love to each other. To watch Mercy’s face is to remember that despite her later forays into comedy, she could and did prove her mettle as an actor of considerable dramatic potential during this time. True, she is a secondary character, but that still doesn’t marginalise the range of emotion she was capable of whenever she was onscreen.

But Obeyesekere the naturalist was soon to retire. In the eighties he went for grittier stories, moving away from the individual and away from the black/white dichotomy which made up most films that depicted class stratifications. His world became harsher, the individual protagonist became submerged in a world that exploited them wherever they were, and Mercy, despite her forays in dramatic roles, found her signature role elsewhere. She hence left drama. And embraced comedy.

This was the Mercy my generation grew up loving. She was paired with Berty, Annesley, and Samuel in “Vinodha Samaya”. She was the same woman in every episode that featured her: caustic, posh, elegant, and clearly aiming for something over and above her position in life. She meant well, she could be sympathetic, but there were times when her less than disguisable flaws proved her undoing. Even with the characters she dubbed later on – as Bianca Castafiore in the Rupavahini version of “The Adventures of Tintin”, for instance – she brought this out very well. Small wonder then, that when we remember these characters, fictional as they were and are, we remember her name.

Vinoda Samaya - Proposal(Annesly,Berty & Samuel)

Do we remember her all the more for it? Of course. Do we forget her earlier career because of it? Perhaps. Not many will remember her as the jealous cousin from Palagetiyo, but even those who haven’t seen Lucien Bulathsinhala’s Tharavo Igilethi would remember “Made Lagina Tharavan” and the sequence in which Mercy, posing with an umbrella that “inflates” her considerably, declares her sense of worth and import to her audience. That was something lesser humorists could never quite match: observe, for instance, her change of pitch and tone and even facial expression as she sings that song, in tune with her self-contradictory character an at once steely and sarcastic (in keeping with the social position she aspires for) but also fragile (as she realises her actual place in life).

It was this curious synthesis – teetering between two extremes, never remaining in one – which made us fall in love with her. You didn’t need to force yourself to laugh at her. You just needed to watch (or listen to) her, as she came up onscreen or onstage and as she wrought her magic. Sure, there was another side to her, one that could have continued in the cinema after her first few trysts with it. But then we wouldn’t have seen the Mercy we knew. Or smiled at.

For better or worse then, she left behind a prodigious career in films. And we are all the better for it, both as consumers of the arts and as citizens of a country where, inevitably perhaps, the line between honesty and artifice in comedy has blurred.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, August 31 2016

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Amarasiri Peiris: On the artiste and the audience

April 24, 2021 by shamilka

Amarasiri Peiris, Uditha Devapriya

Artistes have their views. They voice them from time to time. True, they come out less regularly than we’d want them to, but when they do they’re frank enough to call a spade a spade. The more humble among them, I believe, manage to concede their own inadequacies when indulging in this. Few do, yes, but mercifully they aren’t a minority. Being the veterans they are, they’ve traversed enough to realise that for all the shifts in time and aesthetic tastes, what they bequeathed to us survives and therefore, remains the standard by which we continue to judge and applaud them. Amarasiri Peiris, who remains frank and calls a spade a spade like most of his colleagues, has bequeathed much to us, going by that.

I first heard him, I remember, when I was 10. We were travelling to Colombo, back when Colombo was “far away” and visits to which warranted a song or two over the radio. The song was “Oba Apple Malak Wage”, which has since remained his signature for me for the simple reason that it sums up the man’s vocal texture and frankness. When I spoke with him the other day that was, of course, all there: he has mellowed and continues to mellow, but thankfully, I suspect, he retains that texture. Not surprisingly, he’s still at it here and abroad, and those who follow and fawn on him continue to do so in increasing numbers.

Amarasiri Peiris was born to a musical family. His father, Albert Peiris, had been a respectable figure at Radio Ceylon. “He knew almost all the celebrated figures in his field, including H. W. Rupasinghe. In fact ‘Rupasinghe Master’ was a regular visitor to our house, where he and my father would discuss and debate on music. I was witness to all this as a young boy. So I guess you can say I was tutored in music before I decided to strike out my own path.” Curiously and despite all this however, Albert didn’t want his son to opt for music. I ask him why. He smiles as he replies, “Back then the music industry was as lacking in opportunity as it is today. Perhaps my father sensed that, perhaps he didn’t, but in the end it was my mother who identified my penchant for music and encouraged it.”

He opted for music after he passed his O Levels. While doing his A Levels in the early sixties, he applied to the University of Visual and Performing Arts, back then known as Haywood College. “I was selected in 1963,” he remembers, “after which I had to go through a six year course. It wasn’t easy, considering that in those six years we were virtually debarred from seeking employment elsewhere, but in the end I managed to survive them.” The Principal at Haywood at the time was Lionel Edirisinghe, who despite his detractors today is fondly remembered by Amarasiri: “Our country owes him a great debt, in particular because it was because of him that we have a music form we can claim today. He also was responsible for creating a vast, veritable reserve of music teachers.”

Amarasiri would pass out in 1968, and a short while later, would be taken into Radio Ceylon by the then Chairman and Director-General, Neville Jayaweera. Initially taken in as an A-grade violinist, he would rise up to become a Conductor, Controller, and by the time he retired in 2005, Director of Music. His brush with radical politics would get him into trouble after 1977, and for three years he was without a job. “That was in the late eighties. During D. B. Wijetunga’s presidency, I was called back and was paid in full for those three years I’d been away.”

I ask him as to what he contributed during his time as an administrator in the SLBC. “Well, for one thing, I noticed that none of the programs in the Sinhala sevaya took our listeners beyond the jana gee and Oriental tradition. So I introduced programs on Western symphonies and operas. These were already played out in the English service, but Sinhala audiences didn’t really listen to that.” What of his fascination with Bach, Beethoven, and the Western tradition, then? “All that goes back to my days at Heywood, so when I was working in the SLBC I realised that if our audiences were to be discerning, they should be opened to the outside world. I believe that is what made me what I am today. We must appreciate everything, not just what we can claim as ours.”

His penchant for Western music also goes back to his first encounter with his biggest associate in later years, Premasiri Khemadasa. No biographical sketch of Amarasiri would be complete without mentioning Khemadasa, so I ask him about the man. He predictably becomes more eager and opens his heart. While spatial constraints prevent me from quoting him completely, I will say this: he sees Khemadasa not as a guru but as a grand collaborator, who instilled in him an appreciation of his field. “I was a virtual experiment for him,” he laughs, “My first song was ‘Landune’. He took my voice and varied it, and despite certain reservations expressed by some of his associates, he never stopped using me thereafter.”

At a time when most veterans are wont to disparaging and critiquing modernity, Amarasiri is refreshingly more lenient. For starters, he doesn’t see deterioration in lyricists today. It is a sign of the man’s humility that far from trashing them, he rates them more highly than many of those he worked with in his time. I ask him why, piqued and puzzled as I am, and he readily explains.

“In my day we collaborated when we composed, wrote, and performed a song. In later years, for some strange reason, that spirit of collaboration was superseded by an unnecessary fight for ownership and bragging rights. I will not mention names here, but certain lyricists, composers, and relatives thereof have sent me letters of demand and have forced me to stop singing their songs. I would have appreciated it had they opted for negotiation, but due to their hostility I can only conclude that time has swelled their heads and made them forget their roots. I don’t see this with today’s lyricists. They are thankfully more discerning. And humble.”

He rattles off a list of those lyricists he’s worked with recently, in particular Danister Perera and Dhammika Bandara, and concludes with a flourish: “Before we become artistes we must become human. These youngsters have realised this more than their elders. Tells a lot about our music industry.”

Given his unfortunate encounters with those same elders, who does he think owns a song? “It depends on where it’s placed. If it’s in a film, it belongs to the producer. If it’s standalone, according to the law, the lyricist and composer claim ownership while the singer claims performance rights. The problem here is that I’ve been debarred from those rights on the pretext that by claiming them I am violating the rights of the lyricist and composer!” A tragic Catch-22 dilemma, no doubt. And the end result? “I don’t sing those songs anymore. Not because I can’t, but because I’m hurt by how hostile these people have become.”

While praising modernity however, he isn’t one to commend it blindly. Among its demerits, he cites the discernible confusion between form and content sustained by today’s singers. “Look at Michael Jackson. He sang about love, mankind, and this world we live in. He sang with enough meaning to make us aware about the message he was bringing up. Compare that with those here who try to imitate the way he walked and danced without giving a damn about his message. These imitators have misunderstood form for substance and pretty much done away with the latter.”

All this of course offers much for reflection. Amarasiri Peiris has reflected well. I remember no less a figure than Carlo Fonseka, who collaborated with him over the song “Yanna Giya We” (which sounds like a dirge on lost love but is actually about a lost pet bird), paying tribute to his voice, “as enchanting as it is and as strangely mystical as it seems” (his words to me, from three years back). The good Professor got it right there, I believe. The man’s two biggest assets, his vocal texture and his dexterity with both Western and Eastern musical forms, have hence marked him out well.

Speaking strictly for myself, I am yet to come across a vocalist here who’s capable of the range of emotion and experience he’s dipped into all his life. He has that rare ability to elongate or shorten whatever he sings, which (and I am being simple here, given that I am no musicologist) articulates emotion and in particular, loss, unrequited love, grief, frustration, and sorrow acutely. I am reminded of those few lines in “Minisa Marana Thunak”, which sum up Anoja Weerasinghe’s feelings of jealousy and frustration in Parakrama Niriella’s film Siri Medura: “ලිහිල් සළුව අනතුරේ වැටෙද්දී / පයෝධර තුඩු ඉකිබිඳිද්දී.” That no other person could have articulated the sexual nuances of those lines, or for that matter the raw, almost savage image wrought by them, we don’t doubt. And we shouldn’t.

Written for: Ceylon Today LITE, September 4 2016

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Premakeerthi de Alwis and the parameters of words

April 11, 2021 by shamilka

Premakeerthi De Alwis, Uditha Devapriya

Premakeerthi de Alwis was murdered on July 31, 1989. His assailants were more or less ordinary people, like you or me, fixated on their ideology so much that they disregarded everything which made their victim the man he was. His crime? Announcing at a Gam Udawa concert, the flagship project of a government those who sponsored the murder were hell-bent against. A strange cause for killing someone, but then again politics tends to do strange things to people, turning the innocent into assailant, the celebrated into victim, overnight. No, this is not a political tribute to Premakeerthi. I doubt he had a political life. Most people of his calibre don’t.

We are so entranced by the written word that we rarely affirm simplicity. My grasp of Sinhala, I admit, at best leaves much to be desired: perhaps for that reason, I prefer the spoken to the written word. On the other hand, however, it takes a firm grasp of that written word to make one comfortable and seeped in the spoken dialect. After all, no one can seriously contend that those who wrote, whether as novelists, poets, or playwrights, shrugged off the need to learn the classical aspects to a language just so they could hone in on the colloquial.

The same can be said of lyricists. Most, if not many among them, are so fixated on those classical aspects that they tend to forego on a vast majority of the audience they are attempting to target. In this they are not to be blamed, after all it is a language they are operating in and a language, particularly with regard to those who speak it as their mother tongue, must be known and understood to know and understand a work of art that operates on words.

History is endowed with a horde of artistes who began with the ornate and became simpler: think of the hard to grasp rhetoric of John de Silva’s plays and think of the plays of Sugathapala de Silva, the latter known for their “kitchen sink” dialogues. Think also of the classical poets from Kotte and elsewhere, the splitting of our poetry after the Second World War into two schools (Colombo and Peradeniya), the ideological persuasions that each entertained, and the later transformation of both into simpler, easier to grasp lines, verses, and songs (particularly with the advent of Amaradeva, Sekara, and the likes of Khemadasa and Somadasa Elvitigala).

That is what made Tissa Abeysekara to write, “In the beginning was the melody.” He was correct. In later years that melody would be added to and frilled, only to be returned to its simple, basic essentials again much, much later. Happens everywhere, not just here.

I remember talking once with Premaranjith Tilakaratne, playwright, scriptwriter, lyricist, raconteur, and de-mystifier of myths pertaining to the performing arts, about poets and songwriters. Predictably, we got around talking about Sekara. I argued that his songs represented the peak of the transformation from the classical to the colloquial in our music. He agreed.

I then brought up Premakeerthi de Alwis. He confirmed what I’d been saying all along about poets with his take on the man: “While the likes of Sekara indulged in what can be considered as yuga gee (epochal songs), Premakeerthi opted for less mundane themes in his work.” For me, that represented the essence of the man. He didn’t write yuga gee. He needn’t have. He wrote on simpler, easier to grasp topics. Topics you and I took to at once.

He was born Samaraweerage Don Premakeerthi de Alwis on June 3, 1947. His father Simon worked at the railway, and they lived at Maligakanda, back then (as it is today) a cosmopolitan and crude section of the metropolis. His encounters with his surroundings would have compelled him to write on what can only be called urbanised themes, something his education would have compelled also: first sent to Maligakanda Madya Maha Vidyalaya, he was later educated at Ananda, where he ended up compiling the school magazines (Anandaya and Dhamma Jayanthi). While there he also tried (unsuccessfully) to audition as a singer at Radio Ceylon. He was 14 at the time.

His ambition had been to become a vocalist. After he left school, he took to journalism. In 1966 he joined Visithuru, the film magazine published by Dawasa, under the watchful gaze of its Managing Director D. B. Dhanapala. The following year he joined Radio Ceylon as a freelance announcer. He went up the ranks over time, becoming a full-time announcer in 1971 and, at the time of his murder, an administrator at the News Desk. From 1947, he also became a freelance speaker. Small wonder: his voice, at once gentle, eloquent, and loud, got attention the moment it opened up.

He began his career as a lyricist when he got together with that inimitable vocalist and actor, Freddie Silva. Together with Victor Ratnayake, they gave out some of the bitterest, most acerbic, and yet funniest songs they could have. We remember them even now: “Handa Mama” (a meditation on those who work and those who idle), “Aron Mama” (a parable about those who prattle), “Boru Kakul Karayek” (a reflection on those who walk on stilts, literally and figuratively), and “Gamana Bimana Hari Kadisara” (a warm tribute to the innocence of the kalu kumbiya). These were not epochal songs, yet they enthralled us, simple and witty to a fault as they were.

Here, for instance, are the opening lines to “Handa Mama”

හඳ මාමා උඩින් යතේ
අපෙ මාමා බිමින් යතේ…

In the course of that song, Freddie and Premakeerthi talk of accomplishment and failure, of those who strive and those who choose to idle:

දියුණු වන්න වේලාවක් නැති විය
අපෙ මාමා තව පහළ ගියා
රාජකාරි හරි අකුරට ඉටුකළ
හඳ මාමා තව ඉහළ ගියා…

The words, the melody, the voice: together these deal with a serious if not disturbing subject, infused however with a message that is both timeless and funny. Not many, it must be acknowledged, could have extracted humour from such a theme. Premakeerthi could.

And it wasn’t just with Freddie. Listen to some of his other songs. “Desa Pa Sina” is about the idiocy or naïveté (depending on how you look at it) of youthful romance. “Eda Rae” is about the pain of waiting for love. My two personal favourites, “Oba Dedunna Akasaye” and “Me Nagaraye”, the one joyful and the other poignant, are also on love. “Oba Dedunna Akasaye” in particular has, over the years, gained a currency for itself, in large part owing to what one can consider as the lyricist’s signature: his ability to conjure up an image with his words:

සුළඟේ නළවා
පෙර සේ එනවා
ඔබ මා කළඹා
කිමදෝ යන්නෙ නොරැඳී ගලා…

“Eda Rae” and “Me Nagaraye”, both of which haunt the listener from the perspective of a pained lover, seem to have come straight out of a poem by Thomas Hardy. To make this comparison is to remember that Hardy, and the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron), exerted a considerable influence over the Colombo poets, with whom Premakeerthi associated for some time. “Eda Rae”, for instance, has Milton Mallawarachchi speak these lines:

නැසිය මිතුරන් පැමිණිලා
ආසිරි සුබ පැතුම් පැතුවා
ඔබ නාවේ ඇයි මිහිරියේ?

The verse begins with hope and ends with the pain of thwarted expectation, hinging on hopes for relief and requited love: the same themes we encounter in Hardy’s best poems (like the first stanza of “A Broken Appointment”). This is not to say that all Premakeerthi did was transliterate an experience felt by such poets, but the fact that such a comparison can be made in the first place brings up another point of congruence between him and Hardy: the ability to turn the most mundane words into imagery, to infuse them with powerful feelings, a trait that Hardy derived from some of the greatest English poets, including Wordsworth and the Romantics.

Malinda Seneviratne once wrote, “I found that most of my favourite Sinhala songs were penned by this man.” Why the feeling of surprise? Victor Ratnayake quoted a number not too long ago: 5,000. That’s how many songs Premakeerthi wrote. Not an easy number, particularly owing to the unfortunate conflict between quantity and quality artistes usually succumb to. To have sustained interest in what he wrote was a challenge in itself. To have compounded all that with an output that remains virtually unparalleled for an individual lyricist would have been tougher. No wonder Malinda was surprised.

But if all this was true, why was this man forgotten? Why was he haunted by anonymity? And why do we still “discover” his work?

Because he wrote for the vocalist, some will reply. Because he wrote for the image and that image dissolved into a melody, others will conjecture.

For he had a way with words. He wrote cogently. He wrote prodigiously. So prodigiously that no one can contend he didn’t write enough. He wasn’t selective in the themes he chose to write on, moreover: some of his best songs were in fact rooted in personal experience (think of “Surangeeta Duka Hithuna”). His triumph was that this didn’t make them (too) personalised. Not surprisingly, they touched us, almost as though they’d been written for (and about) us. For we were those who walk on stilts, who idle and celebrate idleness even as they admonish other idlers, and who feel the pain of love as intimately as he might have.

And to a large extent, that is why we can say that anonymity is a curse. Certainly for Premakeerthi and certainly for those countless poets and lyricists whose work transcends those who authored them. Then again though, works of art are like that: they exist without the signature of their authors and, for the most, survive despite the best attempts of some to claim bragging rights over them.

I listened to Premakeerthi de Alwis in his songs, even though I never heard his voice. He was there in them all, despite the fact that he never claimed ownership over them. He made his presence felt. We felt it. So much so that we didn’t need a name under what he penned.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, December 7 2016

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

uditha-devapriya

Remembering Henry Jayasena

Swineetha Weerasinghe: Reflections on an open canvas

By way of tribute to Bandula Vithanage

Malini Fonseka: The girl grows up

Nita Fernando and the parameters of fame

Remembering (the other) Mercy Edirisinghe

Amarasiri Peiris: On the artiste and the audience

Premakeerthi de Alwis and the parameters of words

Newsletter