Uditha Devapriya | Sooriya Records

Vasanthi Chathurani: The girl next door

October 24, 2021 by shamilka

There’s a sweet, almost naive sense of innocence in the early performances of Vasanthi Chathurani. It’s a new sensibility, to me, since a very few actors here, male or female, have been as able as she has been to project a form of purity that is at once enticing and delicate. Most of our actors are content in entrancing us and forming part of our wildest fantasies. Vasanthi doesn’t get us to think of her like this. More often than not, she wins our sympathy, our deepest fears and sorrows, because she’s at home with characters, with daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers, whose main role is to puncture their beauty and sense of charm with a welter of delicateness that can break apart at the slightest intrusion. As Kusum in Gehenu Lamayi and as Nirmala in Ganga Addara – the twin peaks of her early career – she epitomises this kind of female figure so well that she transforms herself into a different acting sensibility, the sensibility I referred to above.

It’s pertinent here to place Vasanthi in a particular context, in our cinema, before moving on to her career. Our actresses more or less continue a tradition begun by Rukmani Devi, a tradition that was passed over to Malini Fonseka in the early seventies. I believe it was Asoka Handagama who observed that Fonseka’s characters are definable by their ability to get every man to hanker after her. This is as true for her mainstream ventures as it is for her less commercial essays – Eya Dan Loku Lamayek and Baddegama – and her roles in films that take an intermediate position between the box-office and serious art – including Apeksha and Diyamanthi. She epitomises, not rebellion, but surrender.

Between the Malini Fonseka of the seventies, who symbolised feminine goodness (largely patriarchal, reflecting the attitudes of popular audiences), and the Swarna Mallawarachchi of the eighties, who symbolised rebellion and retribution, we have Vasanthi Chathurani, who falls into neither category and yet somehow is at home with both. Vasanthi’s most discernible quality in this respect is her voice, because it can alternate between rebellion and submission. In Lester James Peries’s Awaragira, she articulates respect towards their family manor and, later, her love towards a very abusive husband (Lucky Dias), with that voice, signifying the conflict at the heart of her tragedy. But before Awaragira there were other films, all of which followed her transition from the girl next door to a veritable matriarch, and all of which reflected her penchant for delicate beauty. It’s the kind of beauty that can waste away at the hands of abuse, which incidentally is her eventual destiny: to be made use of, rather cruelly and unfairly.

At the end of Gehenu Lamayi, Kusum asks of everyone, including us, “Is this my fate?” The director, Sumitra Peries, resorts to a literal transposition of her imaginings with a dissolve into a carved question mark on a mirror. That was a pretty prescient indication of the type of roles she would be asked to churn out for the next 10 years – in Ganga Addara, in Siribo Aiya, in Parithyagaya, in Adara Hasuna – barring the occasional detour that didn’t always seem convincing – particularly in Biththi Hathara, where her depiction of a sensual woman, who seduces the protagonist (Neil Alles) didn’t, to me at least, seem congruent with her earlier character portrayals – but sometimes was, as with Para Dige, Siribo Aiya, and Kulageya. She wins us unconditionally at this point in her career when she’s denied proper agency, where forced against her free will to submit to everyone else before herself: the parents and the rich aunt in Gehenu Lamayi, the irate father in Ganga Addara, the tempestuous, almost insanely jealous husband in Adara Hasuna.

Vasanthi’s story has been recorded and put down in print so much that I will not go beyond a brief recapitulation of her biography. Born Doreen Peterson in Gampaha, she was educated at Holy Cross College, where she excelled in acting and the arts in general despite the opposition such institutions (it was a Convent) displayed towards girls who get ideas of becoming performers and actresses. She was discovered by Sumitra Peries, in the late seventies, but in those first few days of shooting for Gehenu Lamayi she disappointed if not shocked everyone by her refusal to act in front of the camera. Gehenu Lamayi would have come crumbling down were it not for Lester James Peries’s idea to shoot another sequence, with her clad in school uniforms, at St John Bosco’s College in Hatton, where production mercifully proceeded. Gehenu Lamayi was a success, as was Lester’s Ahasin Polawata, but it was Ganga Addara that propelled her to stardom.

She had to be young when playing these characters, obviously, because the submissive women she got to portray couldn’t have been portrayed with sincerity were she an elder, a matriarch. She attempted to return to her youth at the turn of the millennium with two movies that showed just how much of a hurdle age was when embodying fragility and sensitivity: H. D. Premaratne’s Kinihiriya Mal, where she was a convincing but altogether incongruously cast elder sister to Sangeetha Weeraratne; and Chandran Rutnam’s Poronduwa, a film that was aptly summed up with respect to its choice of cast members (including Vasanthi along with her love interest, Ravindra Randeniya) by Nanda Pethiyagoda as follows: “If I were asked to give a prize, a sort of Oscar, for this latest Sinhala film that is being screened at the Regal and other cinemas, I would award it to the makeup man.” Pethiyagoda would write of Vasanthi’s portrayal, “She is no spring chicken,” acknowledging that she had captured something of her earlier avatar.

You come across a faint trace of this new woman even in the eighties, and particularly in Giraya. As Kamini, Vasanthi doesn’t “inhabit” and “occupy” the plot in the way that her counterpart in Punyakanthe Wijenaike’s story (conceived as a series of diary entries, an epistolary novel) does, but her intrusion into that plot rakes up trouble from her mother-in-law (Grace Ariyawimal) and the ominous maid, Lucy Hami (Trilicia Gunawardena). Giraya’s success owes considerably to the larger texture, the wider scope, which its director, Lester Peries, and scriptwriter, Somaweera Senanayake, brought in and affirmed to take it beyond Kamini’s perspective. What happens in the end is that Kamini, far from being the fearful woman the novel depicts her as, triumphs over her fears through her interaction with the other characters: her sister-in-law (Chandani Seneviratne), the gamekeeper (Cyril Dharmawardena), and the village monk (G. R. Perera). Earlier she would have succumbed, yielded; now she persists, like the unnamed protagonist of Du Maurier’s Rebecca, and towers over both the mother-in-law and the maid.

She tries to echo if not channel this kind of rebellious woman in Awaragira, but fails badly, because that is the fate set for her in the plot. Conceived as a vast family epic, Awaragira is rather episodic in its structure: ranging from the stubborn misadventures of the elder son (Kamal Addaraarachchi) to the thwarted idealism and romances of the younger son (Ranjan Ramanayake), its characters shift from one mood to another, from the hopefulness to deterioration and then complete annihilation. Set against such a large backdrop even Vasanthi changes wildly: in the very first scene she’s in, she proclaims her fidelity to the family and her father, but as the plot progresses she finds herself confusingly lost between her love for her family and for her abusive husband.

There’s a sequence in Awaragira which shows this growing, irreconcilable rift between Vasanthi the girl and Vasanthi the woman. It opens up in the second half of the story, when the family has begun to deteriorate. Awaiting her husband, we see her on a sofa; there are dark spots under her eyes. The wind ruffles her hair, the camera closes in on her, and she gets up after hearing the sound of a car outside. Lucky Dias, cheerful as always, comes up the stairs. “You’re always complaining about me coming home late, so I came early today,” he tells her, handing over a cake to her. Without a word, she takes it and prepares to make some tea for him. The husband is bewildered: “Vasa? What is the problem?” he asks. She replies with an irresolute shaking of the head. Unconvinced, he tries to allay her fears by caressing her, smiling. She nods, barely. In the next sequence featuring these two, they are no longer smiling and nodding; they are fighting.

By this time the family fortunes have begun to sink, and in this sequence, brief and superficially unimportant though it is, Vasanthi becomes a new woman, moving away from the idealism of her youth. That she fails to make this shift owing to her naiveté proves to be her undoing and her brother’s. In the end she channels the woman beneath her, asserts herself, and kills that brother in a sequence that was so choppily and arbitrarily edited by its producer that it fails to do justice to her; but even with this limitation, the murder reminds me, as I mentioned elsewhere, of the killing of Zhivony in Wajda’s Siberian Lady Macbeth, also about a female figure torn between two men.

By this point in her career she had been repressed so much that she aged beyond her years. Her subsequent career, as a result, would never be the same again: Awaragira coincided with the era in which she began producing tele-dramas, almost all of which (starting with Iti Pahana) had her as a stubborn but well-meaning mother. It’s a different Vasanthi we come across here: no longer the girl next door, she has by now embraced the matriarchal figure she was destined to embrace. It’s that matriarchal figure she has now completely been taken over: as a mother, as a sister, as a wife, and of course as a teacher. No longer with that welter of innocence which shrouded her before, she has become the kind of understanding, but determined and assertive person she continues to be today.

Written for: Daily Mirror, November 16 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Douglas Ranasinghe: Second to none

October 9, 2021 by shamilka

Douglas Ranasinghe, Uditha Devapriya

Sena, the protagonist of Madawala S. Ratnayake’s Akkara Paha, embodies for me the failure of the post-1956 youth to realise their social aspirations. Lester James Peries selected Milton Jayawardena, then an unknown player, for the role in his adaptation, while days after his choice was finalised he was visited by Vijaya Kumaratunga. I think it was a blessing, for both Milton and Vijaya, that the former got the character and the latter did not, because Vijaya would have been too brash, too assertive, to depict Sena’s failings and defeatism. In fact so defeatist and so much a failure was he that he gave the impression of being used, and guided, by every other character, especially the woman who ends up as his destroyer, Theresa, and his friend in the first half of the story, Samare. Theresa was played by Janaki Kurukulasuriya, who left the industry afterwards, while Samare was played by Douglas Ranasinghe, who stayed in the industry and remains there today. His performance was so frank, so unlike the more nuanced and gentle characters he would get later, that no less a person than Peries himself remarked that he had great difficulty saving the “hero” from him, a view shared and articulated by Philip Cooray in his book, The Lonely Artist.

Douglas Ranasinghe got to be the secondary player, the supporting actor, in whatever film (commercial or serious) he was in. This has been his biggest strength and limitation, though within his confines he gives out the best he could. You feel that some of his performances – think of Siridasa from Viragaya – are so calculated that they rise above the main actor. Then you feel that his other performances – think of Kulageya – have him as a side player, whose main function is to accentuate the conflict at the heart of the story, or – think here of Aravinda from Yuganthaya – to speak on behalf of the established order, of reason over emotion. Most of our supporting actors from the early days graduated into their own stars, especially Joe Abeywickrama, though some of them remained behind, especially because that’s where they were meant to be until the end (like D. R. Nanayakkara). Ranasinghe, strictly speaking, doesn’t belong to either category, because he transcends himself. And in transcending himself, he transcends his character.

He was born in Kurunegala and was sent, initially and in keeping with the family tradition, to the game iskole, the hodiya panthiya (comparable to the kindergarten today). From the hodiya panthiya he was despatched to St Anne’s College, where he grew to dote on athletics and other sports activities. He obviously remembers his days well even now: “St Anne’s was a missionary school, but unlike today missionary schools took in quite a number of non-Christians. In fact one of my schoolmates was Wijeratne Warakagoda, who was my senior, and who later left to Ananda College.” Apparently his first love, which he encountered while at St Anne’s, had been the military, owing primarily to the sports activities he took part in. Compounding this was the fact that he had been a prefect, which later made him try out the police and which emboldened him to apply for the post of Sub Inspector. Failing twice, he succeeded on the third attempt, and was drafted for a training course at Kalutara.

He also aspired to be a lawyer and to this end, immediately after leaving school, had decided to join Law College. “Acting never really figured in my scheme of things. That’s not to say that I shirked the performing arts, but in my day, films and plays were at best leisure activities, and never career options. By default, as professions, we had either the government service or those other fields which we could prosper in, including the law, medicine, and of course engineering.” Given this it comes to no surprise then that Ranasinghe’s forays into those performing arts was, as he himself admitted, accidental. Onstage, he found his niche through Sathischandra Edirisinghe, who suggested that Ranasinghe play his role (a Corporal) in Henry Jayasena’s Hunuwataye Kathawa. “That training course in Kalutara had at the time been delayed by three months. Sathis aiya had done me a favour, years ago. I was only too happy, consequently, to help him out.” It was a largely propitious debut, since after seeing his performance, Lester James Peries asked after him, took him in, and cast him opposite Milton Jayawardena in Akkara Paha. Jayasena had, naturally enough, been suspicious: “He told Lester, laughing, ‘Now, now, you are taking all my good actors away!’”

His performance as Samare had actually been his second, after G. D. L. Perera’s Romeo Juliet Kathawak (released one year before, in 1968, but filmed after Akkara Paha), which probably more than anything else is remembered for the Sunil Shantha classic that he croons with a guitar, “My Dreams Are Roses.” As for Akkara Paha, Ranasinghe remembers his experiences under Peries with understandable nostalgia. “It was frankly an eye-opener for me. With ‘Maestro’, you’ve always got to be sure of what you do and where you are. He never bosses you around, but that doesn’t mean you can be complacent or that you can forget your cues. In other words, he expects something substantive from you, and to this end opts for three takes: one for him, one for the camera, and one for the lighting. When all three are done, you go for the final take. Because nothing escapes his eyes, incidentally, you need to remember all three.”

What of his career after these two debuts? After taking part in a short film titled Bhavana, directed by the legendary Paul Zils and entered into the Berlin Film Festival of 1970/1971, he decided to leave for England for a three year course at the London Film School. The decision, he tells me, was both conscious and spontaneous: “I left behind a career in law just so I could learn more about the mechanics of filmmaking and acting. At the end of those three years, I was asked to stay back and take part in Shakespearean productions, perhaps to get involved with the Royal Shakespearean Company. But I was homesick. Perhaps a little too homesick. In any case, had I stayed behind, I would have been a different man. Who can tell?” Who can indeed, for even with the supporting characters he got to play after his return, Ranasinghe has retained a welter of conviction which empowers him to be more than who he is. It is in this second phase of his career that he becomes controlled, contained. He has weeded out the emotional hysterics which marked out Romeo Juliet Kathawak and Akkara Paha. Those three years in London helped, clearly.

Opposite both experienced and younger players, he has triumphed: Richard de Zoysa, Chitra Vakishta, and Somi Ratnayake in Yuganthaya; Sanath Gunathilake and Sriyani Amarasena in Viragaya; Vasanthi Chathurani, Sriyani, Lucky Dias, and Tony Ranasinghe in Kulageya. We see him occasionally in glimpses now (Siddhartha Gautama, Aloko Udapadi, Dharma Yuddhaya) and in all his recent performances he has mellowed gracefully. His most distinctive features, particularly his square, firm jaw, lend him both credibility and force. I’d like to think that’s where he triumphs.

Perhaps that’s why, as Aravinda in Yuganthaya, he doesn’t retain the sort of conviction he echoes in Viragaya. In Martin Wickramasinghe’s novel Aravinda is a flawed antihero, an aspirant who wishes to join the upper echelons of a society that he has from birth been alienated from. Lester Peries finds an equivalent, somehow, for Ranasinghe through several sequences which have him wondering through his village, silently, introspectively, and advising his friend Malin (Richard de Zoysa) against being a political rebel. But we are never used to this Ranasinghe, because in his other performances he doesn’t caution against rebellion but becomes more understanding of the reasons behind that rebellion. He does nurture a conservative streak (as Siridasa in Viragaya, for instance, he trivialises Aravinda’s selflessness as foolishness), but that never crops up to the extent whereby he represents, and affirms, the Establishment.

It’s a tragedy at one level, but I believe that we have ignored Ranasinghe’s versatility. For one thing, he has in addition to the cinema also operated in theatre, television, and radio broadcasting. Not every actor has taken part in, much less aspired for, all those fields, which is why the fact that the man has been involved in them deserves more scrutiny. That’s also a reason why his views on contemporary cinema, here, deserve more than a cursory sketch. Since I can at best offer such a sketch, though, here goes:

“To be honest, now the cinema teeters between crass commercialism and anti-war ideologies. The latter wins awards, the former wins hearts. I am not saying that we don’t see a middle way between these two, but they are hard to come by. As a filmmaker myself, I prefer the lives, emotions, and sentiments of my people to what any outsider thinks they ought to be. Sadly enough, few ‘serious’ directors today realise this.” And he comments on how different the characters portrayed onscreen were in his day. “Back then we had a kind of character called the ‘parajithayo’. They lost out on life. They lost out on love. But through their defeat, they became heroic figures. I can think of two characters here, now: Sena in Akkara Paha and Sugath in Golu Hadawatha. But with the advent of time, they changed and went out of fashion. That’s why we see polar opposites in mainstream films now: they are either angels or villains. Such characters do not exist, and reality isn’t so stark, but I suspect filmmakers are playing into audience sentiments.”

Written for: Daily Mirror, January 2 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

T. M. Jayaratne: The man behind the voice

September 25, 2021 by shamilka

T.M.Jayaratne, Uditha Devapriya

I first encountered T. M. Jayaratne through the films of K. A. W. Perera. I never bothered to check out his other work because, for me, he was at his best when he was crooning about love, be it young, requited, spurned, or revived. The themes these movies evoked, I felt, were most sincerely articulated by his voice. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that he had forayed into other productions, that he led other lives, and that like all such artistes from his time he couldn’t be compartmentalised. I met him about a month ago. Here’s an attempt at a sketch.

T. M. was born in the village of Dodanwala near Kandy in 1944. He was firstly sent to St Anthony’s College in Katugastota, where he forayed into Western music. “What we did for our music class was gather around our teacher and her piano and sing those usual childhood melodies, like ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ and ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.’ Not surprisingly, we became more inclined towards Western music.”

Of his elders at St Anthony’s, T. M. remembers the Rector, Reverend Father Rosati, with unmistakeable nostalgia. A graduate from the University of London, Father Rosati always sought to endear himself to the students. “We adored him. In fact you couldn’t escape him. He used to visit our classes and ask us questions. If we answered him correctly, he’d praise us and give us lozenges. After handing those lozenges, he’d smile at the others and say, ‘And for those who didn’t get the correct answer, please don’t get annoyed with me, I have some for you as well.’ That he was loved by us was only to be expected.”

T. M.’s father, a government servant, had been prone to those compulsory transfers which “afflict” such workers in general. Barely two years after T. M. was enrolled at St Anthony’s, for instance, he had been requested to leave for Nuwara Eliya. Since it meant finding another school for his son, he decided to travel alone. “He’d leave for work on Monday morning and come back on Friday evening to spend the weekend with us. He endured this routine for two years, after which he got another transfer, this time to Anuradhapura. He pushed for a delay. He got it delayed for two years.”

Once those two years were up, predictably, the transfer request was renewed. “We needed to act fast. There was an aunt of mine who lived in Kurunegala. Father got himself a transfer there. I was taken from St Anthony’s and put into Maliyadeva College.” He entered Grade Seven after the switch.

So how had things been at Maliyadeva? “It wasn’t easy to get used to the shift,” T. M. remembers, “In hindsight, I believe that was because of the kind of culture we had at St Anthony’s. Lessons were always conducted in English, though elsewhere we spoke in Sinhala. Maliyadeva was more indigenous, more sensitive to our culture. English was limited to one subject. I realised this was true even in the way music was taught. There were no nursery rhymes. Only ragas and Hindustani melodies.”

It’s probably a sign of the connoisseur in the man, but he doesn’t take this as a license to bemoan what had been taught at St Anthony’s. “We loved the melodies we grew up with there. If you think about it, there’s really no difference between the ‘Do Re Mi’ I had absorbed and the ‘Sa Ri Ga Ma’ I was absorbing now. I believe that helped me appreciate both the East and the West.” This, incidentally, had been supplemented by the senior music master at Maliyadeva, K. M. Dayapala.

Apparently Dayapala had encouraged him and his friends to sit for certain external music exams while pursuing their studies. T. M. remembers him as a persistent teacher who nevertheless strived to keep his students a cut above the rest. That explains why he pushed them to get through all three stages of that exam, conducted by the Gandharva Sabha and held in Kandy. They were all based on two categories: Vocal and Instrumental. With respect to the latter, Dayapala initiated young T. M. into the violin.

The exams ended. The results came. While the University entrance exams were around the corner, a gazette notification calling for applications from those who aspired to teach music was published. Dayapala requested his students to sit through the University entrance and apply immediately afterwards.

Having done just that, T. M. was called to and subsequently interviewed at the Education Department in Kollupitiya. Four weeks later, he was called again along with three women. “I thought that the others had been swept off and this was to select the cream of the crop. Daunted, I abandoned any hopes and illusions I had of becoming a teacher. Imagine how amazed and excited I was when the Director informed me that I had been appointed to a school in Colombo!” This was in 1966.

On September 7 that year, he was posted to Hewawitharana Maha Vidyalaya Rajagiriya, where he taught for the next 26 years. Coincidentally, he was appointed the same day Victor Ratnayake (Aththalapitiya Maha Vidyalaya in Bandarawela), Sanath Nandasiri (Uhana Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Mervin Perera (Kohombara Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Shelton Perera (Sri Pada Maha Vidyalaya in Hatton), and Sarath Dassanayake (Niwaththakachethiya Maha Vidyalaya in Anuradhapura) were. “Back then I only knew Victor Ratnayake. All our careers converged frequently thereafter, not surprisingly.”

While wading through his job, T. M. would get involved with various stage dramas and concerts which supplemented his income (about 200 rupees). “I would get up to 20 rupees a show,” he smiles, “Not much by today’s standards, but a lot back then considering that my rent was 55 rupees a month!” Those shows, moreover, got him into a vivida prasangaya organised by the Teachers Training College in Maharagama, where he was compelled to perform in place of a singer who hadn’t turned up.

The organiser of that prasangaya, C. de S. Kulathilaka, was subsequently appointed as the Head of the Folk Music Research Unit at the SLBC. He had been impressed with T. M.’s voice, so soon afterwards he took him into the Unit to “perform” refined, accompanied versions of various folk songs he was tasked with recording from across the country. “One of the songs I performed, ‘Badda Watata Sudu Mora Mal’, was heard by a man who called the SLBC, asked after me, and learnt that I taught at a school which neighboured his house. I started working with him soon after.”

That man, who’d end up as his most frequent collaborator, was Premasiri Khemadasa, whose association with T. M. deserves an entire chapter. Spatial constraints prevent me from delving any further, however, so I think it best to get a summing up of arguably our most versatile composer from the 20th century.

“He got me into film music. My first film song with him was for Lester James Peries’ Desa Nisa (‘La Hiru Dahasak’), followed by K. A. W. Perera’s Nedeyo and Janaka saha Manju, the latter of which got me a Presidential Award as the Best Playback Singer for ‘Ko Ma Pathu.’ I ended up with a horde of directors from both the commercial and non-commercial sectors, among them Dharmasena Pathiraja.”

What of Khemadasa the man? “He was quite mercurial. If he wanted something out of you and you didn’t deliver, he could get belligerent. He often was, and he often lost his temper, but he’d immediately cool down and pat your back. With a horde of violinists tutored in Western classical music, among them Eileen Prins and Douglas Ferdinands, he revolutionised Sinhala music as we know it. In this he wasn’t trying to ‘Westernise’ us: he didn’t care if we had to ‘import’ bricks from England, as long as it helped us build the Dalada Maligawa properly. He was a marvel to work under and work with, to be honest.”

So what of T. M.’s career as a teacher? “I was briefly employed as an Assistant Director in the Aesthetics Division of the Ministry of Education when W. J. M. Lokubandara was in charge of the subject. After some time, however, I got tired. So after Lokubandara was succeeded by Richard Pathirana, I tendered my resignation and sought employment as a teacher at Sacred Heart College in Rajagiriya, less than a kilometre from my earlier school. I taught for five years there, and then retired.”

Looking back, it’s quite evident that the man’s career has been prolific. When I put to him that his time would have been qualitatively different to ours in terms of the interrelationships between the composer, the lyricist, and the performer, he agrees and says, “Back then there was a sense of unity. Quality had to be in top form. Today you have digitalised the process: if you get your recording wrong, you can always rely on software to correct it. What gets ‘absented’ there is spontaneity. And sincerity.”

Speaking for myself, I agree. Perhaps it’s a testament to T. M. Jayaratne that he has given us what he could, the way he could, sensitively, sincerely, and spontaneously. He has not been unsuccessful, I know.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 6 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Vijaya Nandasiri: The comedian as professional

September 12, 2021 by shamilka

Uditha Devapriya, Vijaya Nandasiri

A tribute to Vijaya Nandasiri, who left us but not our consciousness a year ago.

Vijaya Nandasiri was greater than his successors in Sinhala comedy the same way that Joe Abeywickrema was greater than his predecessors. The latter was the apotheosis of Eddie Jayamanne. He was of course greater than Eddie could be, since Eddie’s roots were in the theatre, never really on film. Vijaya, on the other hand, was the grand culmination of everything that Joe stood for, with the caveat that the one was manifestly different to the other. He is the last comic we can claim as of today, since everyone else, as I pointed out in my last article, were and are at best mimetic.

Despite their differences, both began their careers as comic foils, whose function in the movies they were in was to console the protagonists. In the sixties Joe was almost always this foil, with Getawarayo (opposite Gamini Fonseka) and Dahasak Sithuvili (opposite Henry Jayasena). The seventies saw him emerge as his own player, good and redeemable except when he was the antihero or villain, in which case he was either doomed to suffer and die (Welikathara and Bambaru Avith) or to disappear from the story altogether (Suddilage Kathawa and Adara Hasuna). The only difference between them was this: while Joe belied a serious facade even in the most absurd dilemmas, Vijaya could at most only pretend to such a facade.

Vijaya’s inability to hide the absurdity of whatever situation he was in proved to be his strength just as his ability to so do proved to be Joe’s. Even in Kolamba Sanniya, the most enduring tribute to Sinhala comedy ever conceived on film (lavishly produced, it was a lavish hit at the box-office), you never distrust his ability to walk on a tightrope. As funny or inescapable some of the dilemmas he’s in are, he escapes them, trumping his own family’s expectations of him by contesting as a politician in his area. He’s a man of order, of method, even though he deceives us into thinking that he’s not. “Yuri Gagarin, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy: they are all my cousins!” he pompously remarks in Kolam Karayo. We disbelieve him, obviously, but not the sincerity and conviction with which he utters it.

The opposite was true for Vijaya Nandasiri’s characters. “I’m an honest man!” he parrots out as Rajamanthri. We believe neither the remark nor the confidence and conviction. Because both the man and his ideals are never what they seem, he was almost always a trickster, a conman, a deceiver no matter how good his intentions were. His characters were all vain, conceited, and self-centred, interested in what is out there only as long as it serves him. Loud but never too loud, brash but never too brash, his characters were almost always cowards when it came to grappling with reality.

He revelled in having no self-respect even when we ascribed to him some sense of honour and dignity. In Nonawarune Mahathwarune Premachandra flirts with the woman next door (Sanoja Bibile) though we never get why the latter returns his affections (is she tired of her husband, or is she truly infatuated with her idiotic neighbour?). As Senarath Dunusinghe in Yes Boss, the situation is reversed: he has to suffer another man playing around with his wife, the problem being that the man happens to be his employer who doesn’t know that they are married (couples can’t work at the same office). You wonder why he doesn’t seek shelter in another agency, but then there wouldn’t be a story in the first place, would there?

Vijaya represented our contempt for womanisers, cuckolds, and politicians by turning them into stereotypes to be laughed at. In Nonawarune Mahathwarune he was the womaniser, in Yes Boss he was the cuckold (though his wife only pretends to give in to their boss’s advances), and as Rajamanthri, easily the most recognisable comic figure in our cinema from the past 20 or so years, he was the politician. It was as Rajamanthri that he prospered, even in those movies where he wasn’t him (as with Sikuru Hathe, King Hunther, and Magodi Godayi). Joe could never quite transform our contempt for his characters because they weren’t contemptible in the first place: they were either lovable or hateful. His calm exterior never betrayed itself, as I pointed out before, whereas for Vijaya it always would.

Some years ago I watched a miniseries on Rupavahini about a politician and his driver. Vijaya Nandasiri was the politician, Vasantha Kumarasiri the driver. And yet I sensed something odd about them. Their voices were different. The dubbing team had synced one actor’s with the other, a feat that survived the first 10 or 15 minutes of the first episode, after which these two meet a horrible accident which (inexplicably) leaves both onlookers and relatives confused as to what body is whose.

Because both are so near dying, a quick surgery is followed by a quick plastic surgery, in which the wrong face is placed on the wrong body. The voices are back to the correct actor. In hindsight this was an unnecessary gimmick, but it was also a welcome gimmick, since for the rest of the story the driver becomes the conservative believer in authority and the politician the radical believer in Marx. Crude, and rather one-dimensional, but fun. And it wasn’t just a change of voice: it was also a change of spirit, of two contradictory personalities transplanted to each other. That was Vijaya’s charm. You could never anticipate anyone other than him, when he was there.

If Joe was redeemable because he was at the receiving end of some confusing dilemma (like the baby he has raise in Punchi Baba, or the lifestyle of Colombo he has to get used to in Kolamba Sanniya), Vijaya was unredeemable because he was at the other end, always provoking if not unleashing some havoc. It’s probably not a coincidence that in this respect, his characters were always middle class, consumerist, often in professions that called for security, stability, sometimes status: as a Junior Visualiser in an advertising agency in Yes Boss, the chief in a security firm in Sir Last Chance, and a sergeant in Magodi Godayi. Where he was his own man – the magul kapuwa in Sikuru Hathe or Rajamanthri in so many movies and TV series – he wasn’t a provocateur, but a lovable antihero. And like all antiheroes, he conceals goodness because he despises it, like in Sikuru Hathe, where all those deceptions he commits were for his daughter.

Where he was paired with another actor, he failed. He was his man, so when in Methuma he and Sriyantha Mendis are caught as two lunatics by a veda mahaththaya in some village, he didn’t really shine the way he had in Ethuma. Even in Magodi Godayi, opposite Gamini Susiriwardana, he was less than he usually was. Yes Boss and Nonawarune Mahathwarune had him among other actors, to be sure, but then he was on his own there. He could have been in his own world.

So once he was cast with another actor, he couldn’t give his best. He could give his best only if his co-star was alert and alive to his range, or if his character was a lesser breed than that co-star. That is what transpired in King Hunther, where he could be himself opposite Mahendra Perera for two reasons: because Mahendra was a versatile comic actor himself, and because Hunther was from a different time, so different and long ago that this present world (in which Mahendra is an escaped convict) is outlandish, overwhelming. It needed time to get used to, and that meant getting used to the first two people he befriends: Mahendra and Anarkali Akarsha.

Vijaya Nandasiri’s triumph then was his gift at getting us to feel for unfeeling antiheroes. Sometimes he could trump us, as Joe often did, like in King Hunther, when he hears that the politician who befriends him to further his own interests has decided to kill him off, and surreptitiously escapes. You never thought he was capable of such a feat, but that’s how the movie ends. In vindicating his faith in us, he was getting us to vindicate our faith in him, no matter how idiotic he was.

He couldn’t be like that as Rajamanthri because he was not reflecting our contempt for figures of authority, but downright embodying it. When, towards the end of Suhada Koka, he is killed off by an assassin acting on the orders of the second-in-command to the Prime Minister (W. Jayasiri), there’s a homily on the corrupting influence of power that’s supposed to represent every politician’s ultimate fate. And then, just as you come to terms with this end, he wakes up (because it was a nightmare).

You’d think he’d learn from his fears, but he doesn’t. Even after that harrowing fantasy, he’s back to being the pompous figure he always was and will be. But in that short sequence he told us everything that needed to be told about the way in which the corrupt could be taught the errors of their ways. Was it a cruel coincidence that the only time Rajamanthri was killed off like that marked the last time Vijaya played Rajamanthri? We don’t really know, but perhaps it was more than a coincidence. Perhaps it was the only fitting end to such a career that could be filmed.

Written for: Daily Mirror, August 17 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Edna Sugathapala: Scripting humility into life

August 21, 2021 by shamilka

Edna Sugathapala, Uditha Devapriya

She is known for her acting, particularly during a time when film as is known here and today was at its peak. She has her associations, her acquaintances, those she met and befriended on and off the set. To limit her to cinema however would be doing her an injustice, something she implies early on in the interview. Yes, you saw her paired in film after film with some of the “top stars” of our cinema. Yes, they all won her praise and unruffled success.

But Edna Sugathapala is not just an actress. One doubts whether she wants to or can be pigeonholed into that profession alone. For that matter, one doubts whether she CAN be pigeonholed into ANY profession at all. She has done what she has done with utmost sincerity. No pigeonholing possible there.

She can play the piano and play it well, for one thing. She has mastered three other instruments as well. She has released a CD and DVD chronicling her love for the piano, and states unequivocally that she doesn’t want to stop it at that. As she delves into her biography, full of interesting anecdotes but never obese on frill, she makes one thing clear: she hasn’t stopped at anything at any point in her life.

Edna was born in 1946. She was educated at Good Shepherd Convent in her hometown Panadura, and later at Holy Family Convent, Bambalapitiya. She describes herself during all her school years as “studious and quite prone towards books”, which set her apart from her friends and worked its charm on her mother. Music, it seems, had fascinated her a lot, and so at the age of six her mother had not only bought her a piano, but through it got her to take (and pass) the Higher Local Exam. “Back then it was foreigners who came and judged for that exam,” she remembers, “I remember the comment they made on my recital: ‘brilliant touch’.”

The piano didn’t stop intensifying her love for music, by the way. While at the church choir she learnt to master the organ, while elsewhere she got to handle the accordion and guitar. Nor did this stop her from pursuing her other interests: she loved dressmaking, for one thing, and in the end enrolled in the Kathleen School of Dressmaking in her hometown.

She had learnt to value time and efficiency. With more than one interest to pursue and being musically inclined, she never forgot to fine-tune her skills, often waking up at three in the morning to practise before heading to school. Her mother, whom she recalls fondly, was a strict woman, “and more pertinently a strict Catholic woman”, who while never severe on young Edna had nonetheless had her way with her obedient, studious daughter.

10407335_795730287174050_5449987169413444527_n

Inadvertently however, she had got involved with a field of work the mother had learnt to scorn. This was astrology. The mother being a devout Catholic had despised the looking up of horoscopes, but through an uncle had been persuaded to look up her own via a prominent astrologer in Nugegoda. The astrologer, Daniel Gamariya gurunnanse, was known throughout the country then. Sceptically, she had paid him a visit with Edna.

The daughter explains what happened next. “My mother was quite the critic. She stopped the gurunnanse when he was reciting her horoscope. She told him that his interpretation was wrong. He did not stop. He asked as to when she was born and questioned whether the clock which recorded that time was pitch-perfect. ‘Maybe not,’ she confessed. The astrologer then changed her planet from Mercury to Venus, and began revising her horoscope. Lo and behold, he converted my mother and with her me that day by reading almost every portion of her life correctly and to the point. ‘Now am I wrong, madam?’ was his parting shot at her. ‘No,’ she stammered.”

Along the way back to Panadura, young Edna had openly professed an interest in astrology. The mother, knowing how studious the daughter was (“I was always first in class,” she recounts now, with justifiable pride) let her have her way for once, and took her to another astrologer, H. H. Premaratne gurunnanse.

The gurunnanse had initially been wary of teaching Edna, complaining that “girls from prim, proper Colombo schools cannot be taught the art of reading the future”. Thanks to her mother’s overtures however, in the end he relaxed his position and offered to impart to Edna the secrets of his trade. She was 13 at the time.

More than 50 years on, she still reads horoscopes, predicts the future, and publishes some of her “anavaki” in various newspapers. As she browses through old newspaper clippings, she herself comes across some of the more profound ones: to do with presidential elections and deaths of famous stars. She in fact predicted Gamini Fonseka’s death two years before it happened, December 2002 to be specific. There are of course other predictions too numerous to mention here, but suffice it to say that they all have come true in one form or another.

So in this context how did she take to films? Again, through her mother. She had been a film producer, and had financed Daskon, an expensive historical epic. She was about 12 at the time when she saw Daskon, “a financial failure” as she recalls now. It was her first encounter with the Sinhala cinema, as well as with two people she’d meet again and again in the career to come, Rukmani Devi and Fonseka himself.

For her entry into cinema though, she had to go through the theatre (metaphorically speaking). She was trained and tutored by the famous theatre producer Dick Dias. The year was 1966 when she got to act in her first play (“Gehenu Hatana”). 10 years earlier he had initiated Jeevarani Kurukulasuriya (“Maa Henae Riri Yaka”) into acting, and 10 years before that he had done the same for Rukmani (“Janaki Haranaya”). When asked whether this was a prophetic sign, she laughs and lays out Dias’ credentials.

“He was a kind man. Not just a theatre producer but one who knew his field well. He was originally an engineer, he began financing these plays, and in the end managed to introduce some of his more incisive actors and actresses into both the stage and cinema. In fact it was Dias who financed the first production of ‘Siri Sangabo’, which was a landmark by all accounts thanks to its final, memorable scene of the altruistic king beheading himself in front of the audience. So yes, I am indebted to him today.”

Her initiation into cinema, however, was tougher. Not only had there been calls to get her off-screen, people visibly began commenting on how she was fat, was not photogenic enough, and even didn’t augur well for films. Again, it had been an acquaintance of hers who had come to her rescue. “When Das Mohammad thought of auditioning me for Surayangeth Suraya, Gamini Fonseka advised him to take me if I read my lines properly. Remember, Daskon may have been a failure, but Fonseka was popular at the time and it was his first film after Daiwayogaya. He knew my mother had suffered a loss because of that film.”

She was taken for Surayangeth Suraya, needless to say. In later years she hobnobbed and got to act with several “stars”, so to speak. She rattles off a list here: Joe Abeywickrema, Tony Ranasinghe, Freddie Silva, Denawaka Hamine, Sandya Kumari.

She had other encounters, of course. She met and sang for Karunaratne Abeysekera, both for his famous “Handa Mama” radio program and elsewhere. She wrote a book contemplating life and death with “Sugatha Chintha”, which in later years earned praise from Rosy Senanayake and in her time earned a letter as a reply to it from a monk in Denipitiya, Galle. She was a close friend of Lenin Moraes, who had directed her in some of her best known films, and in the end was by his deathbed during his last moments. There are other personalities she has met and befriended too, but spatial constraints restrict recounting them all here. All that one can say about them is that she has come and seen them all, but not to a point where she’s wallowed in that fatal trap stars get into, fame. Not to say she hasn’t enjoyed fame, but at the same time she’s been careful and methodical enough not to let it blind her.

And in a way, this has allowed her to pursue what she considers to be her real interests, in music. Last year she released a CD collection of her piano recitals. She played them all on her instrument: baila, classical music, church music, a kaleidoscope offering virtually everything from Nanda Malini to Keerthi Pasqual. She’s played them with a subtle touch, one notes, keeping well to the spirit of every song she’s turned into an instrumental. “I enjoyed playing them very much, but was careful enough not to invite every proverbial Tom, Dick, and Harry when I launched them,” she recalls, adding that among her guests was Professor Carlo Fonseka, well known for his views on artists and a music lover himself.

The ball didn’t and doesn’t stop there, of course. For someone of her calibre, being able to play not only one or two but four musical instruments, she should reach for more. And she does. Next year she hopes to release an album of her organ recitals, which she promises will be different to what she’s done and released so far. “The organ, mind you, is not like the piano. I’d say the latter is harder to master, but that doesn’t trivialise the fact that the organ has a preconceived tempo set into its system nowadays, and you need to keep up with it. So yes, in one way it’s hard to master as well.” She plays C. T. Fernando’s “Bara Bage”, remembered and relished by young and old then and now.

When asked why she’s doing all this now, she sobers. Noticeably. “For one thing, I will be celebrating my 70th birthday. It is my wish that I do something for that, not with celebration and cheer but with some interest I’ve loved to follow from my childhood. I’ve done with the piano on this count, so I guess the organ’s next in line for me. This is not a vanity project moreover, because I know fans love my recitals. I feel I should have done this many, many years ago. But I never got the chance to do it. Time hasn’t been unkind to me always, and I’ve never failed to keep myself healthy and rosy. So perhaps it’s best that I do it now.”

At an age when most actresses would probably contemplate life and bid farewell to pursuing their interests (whatever they may be), Edna Sugathapala is a shining example. For someone who could have grabbed at fame and probably gone beyond Sri Lanka, she has opted to stay away, practise restraint, and instead retire to a life of peace, music, and harmony. She doesn’t reek of wealth though, and for this reason her expenses for her earlier album were stifling, overbearing almost. So it is with her next album too, unless someone who appreciates taste and the contribution she’s made to our cultural firmament (not only the cinema, please note) comes forward.

Will he or she step forward? That remains to be seen. One small step, if it be taken at all, and certainly one giant leap for her.

Written for: Daily News, November 18 2015

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

The Dimpled Star

August 8, 2021 by shamilka

Sangeetha Weeraratne, Uditha Devapriya

She has acted in over 40 films. Her signature is evident in them all, to the extent that we sense her presence even before she enters a scene or sequence. That’s class. That’s Sangeetha Weeraratne. Yes, she was part of my growing up, figuring in those movies and TV shows I saw.

But there is something in her I can’t forget or fathom. Something to do with her style of acting, which is at once vibrant and reserved. That’s a rare quality I agree, and in Sangeetha I see an actress capable of much more than what she does today.

All this peripheral, however.

Sangeetha didn’t take to movies as a child. She had apparently liked maths (and dancing) more. Her interest in the cinema began when her father, the famed cinematographer and director Timothy Weeraratne, entered the second phase of his career, in the late 1980s. Her family had been business-oriented, and she admits that she was more interested in the financial aspect of movie-making: “I had a flair for accounts.”

Time passed. She took part in her first film, Roy de Silva’s It’s a Matter of Time, when she was just 16. It’s an irony of fate perhaps, but she found herself paired with an actor she would meet over and over again throughout her career. “I acted opposite Kamal Addararachchi. In hindsight, this benefited me tremendously, because he taught me much about acting.”

I ask her whether she found it difficult to get used to films and acting at this stage, and she admits that while acting wasn’t a priority for her yet, cinema was in her blood. “Every time my father would get a new camera, for example, I would pose in front of him. I would be the camera’s ‘guinea pig’,” she says, indicating just how much her interest in films had been widened during those early, tender years.

But if It’s a Matter of Time was a mainstream debut for Sangeetha, the films that followed would test her potential completely. In a way, this had to do with how she understood the cinema as the years went by. She had initially been a fan of on-the-beaten-track, mainstream films; as time passed and she matured, she took to more serious cinema.

Gamini Fonseka’s Nomiyena Minisun had Sangeetha in her very first serious role. Talking about Fonseka, she says that he knew actors so well that he could grind out whatever he wanted from them. “As you know, I was new to films at the time. One of my biggest challenges was continuity. How does one maintain the same face and emotion in a sequence that is shot in two different days?”

She remembers one sequence that illustrates this well. “I had to play out a pregnant woman who learns that her boyfriend is dead. That’s tough. I was 17 then, in my teens. Let alone pregnancy, I didn’t even know what it was like to have a boyfriend!” Nonetheless, she managed to perform convincingly at the first take. “To this day, I don’t know how I managed to act that out.”

This wasn’t all. “As I told you, continuity was my biggest challenge then, especially when we had to continue this sequence two weeks later. I think Mr Fonseka knew this. Or maybe not. In any case, what happened was that while I was there on the set, wondering what I had to do, he came up-to me, opened my eyes, and burst a can of glycerin into them.”

Just a little bit of that stuff, I have to admit, is enough to make you tear. Sangeetha would have been in hellish pain at the time: “It certainly was painful,” she says, understating what she went through, “But at the end of the day, Mr Fonseka got what he wanted. I cried.”

Both Kamal and Fonseka had been strong role models. I would have to agree. Both were highly individualistic, stubborn enough to realise that the way they acted and made films suited their styles, no matter how harsh the critics were. “Kamal was especially firm,” Sangeetha tells me, “He knows how best he can act.” I put it to her that some people see him as flamboyant and vivacious, and she agrees. “He has enough and more potential, a vast reserve of talent.”

She remembers other names. Other directors. She remembers H. D. Premaratne with immense gratitude. “I got to act with Kamal in two of his films. Looking back, I must say that working with him was enjoyable in every way.” Saptha Kanya, which showed Premaratne at the peak of his career, had Sangeetha as a pickpocket who befriends Kamal. Almost as in a fairy-tale, the two of them fall in love, and the story teeters and totters along with its share of subplots, climaxes, and melodrama. “It earned quite a lot for its time,” she admits. Not surprising.

There was also Vasantha Obeysekara, a director as far removed from Premaratne’s style as anyone could be. “Premaratne was very reserved. He was quite friendly with us, but never betrayed emotion while on the director’s chair. Vasantha, on the other hand, gets very emotionally involved with his films.” This would have meant that he would have got involved with his actors too. Sangeetha agrees with me here. “He was almost a father-figure to us actually. And like a father-figure, he would berate us down or praise us to the skies as he saw us.”

It’s arguable whether Sangeetha’s greatest talent has been seen in Obeysekara’s films. We saw her firstly in Maruthaya, as the daughter of a deceased politician, whose downfall the director observes clinically but reflectively. We also saw her in Dorakada Marawa, undoubtedly her most powerful role, as the troubled fiancée of Sanath Gunathilake. There was also Salelu Warama and Sewwandi, the latter being the first film she financed and produced.

I put it to her that we remember these roles because they were all based on true stories, which gave them an authentic edge, and she agrees. “I concede that a film like Salelu Warama is quite different from Saptha Kanya. Both are love stories, and both have Kamal. But Vasantha’s film is more nuanced, more engaged. It delves into class consciousness, into emotion, and asks a question from the audience: would you kill for love? Inevitably, I had to perform more authentically and convincingly there.”

Her story doesn’t end here. She is remembered for other roles. She was there in Premaratne’s last film, Kinihiriya Mal. Given how negatively certain critics reviewed it, I ask her whether she found working in that film strange. “Not really,” she replies, “The film had a fairy-tale edge to it, as do almost all of Premaratne’s films.”

This must have been so because the film showed him at his bitterest, at odds with the optimist that came out in his other films. We see this reflected at the end of the story too, where, after we imagine that everything will be alright for the heroine (a garment worker turned prostitute), a figure from her past comes back and kills her. Just like that. “There is a line between real-life and fiction in that story, but the reality explored in that film is not make-believe.”

It’s certainly beyond my task to go into a role-by-role analysis of Sangeetha’s career. That will do for some other time. “We have so much potential that we can take from our actors,” she says by way of wrapping up our discussion, “Personally, I would love it if our filmmakers delved into issues our women and children face. We don’t see that happening. What we see are films that copy Bollywood and Hollywood, that leave nothing for us to digest. That’s sad.”

Perhaps it’s a testament to her fortitude that Sangeetha has rarely deteriorated into histrionics or glamour in her serious roles. That’s talent. But then again, I am talking with a rare actress. A rare human being, too. And at the end of the day, as her career moves along, she will be remembered for that. All the way. No mean feat, you must admit.

Written for: Ceylon Today LATITUDE, January 25 2015

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

Remembering Henry Jayasena

July 25, 2021 by shamilka

Henry Jayasena, Uditha Devapriya

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…

uditha-devapriya

Vasanthi Chathurani: The girl next door

Douglas Ranasinghe: Second to none

T. M. Jayaratne: The man behind the voice

Vijaya Nandasiri: The comedian as professional

Edna Sugathapala: Scripting humility into life

The Dimpled Star

Remembering Henry Jayasena

Swineetha Weerasinghe: Reflections on an open canvas

Newsletter