10 December 2019 12:04 am Views - 409
Why are we so afraid of calling out mediocrity for what it is? The truth is that in terms of quality and staying power, Sinhala theatre has since of late come down. Half the productions at this year’s State Drama Festival played on tropes and themes which I had seen or come across in the years before. The same can be said of school productions. Inter school competitions used to have the top members of the boards of school drama societies (obviously, students) vet the submitted scripts and sending back the approved ones for further refinement, embellishment and excision. This happened at Abhina also, though since there were only five schools at this year’s ceremony the process had to be cut down. Which, if you think about it, makes everything the sadder, especially given that some of the boys and girls heading these drama societies are themselves quite talented.
If we are to have a flourishing drama culture, we must have school societies which do not tolerate and indeed tries to exterminate mediocrity. This is not, strictly speaking, my opinion only; it is the opinion of judges, academics, activists, and even students. In Sinhala theatre one comes across either morality plays, exuberant, colourful, but half-transposed translations, or exercises in existentialism. The need for a story that coheres, that parses, that comes together in full circle at the end, is left out, so much so that by the time the production reaches its second half we either have given up or can predict what’s going to unfold. That was the beauty of Grease Yaka Returns; even if you could predict what was happening before you, the plot’s unfolding was scripted in such a way as to evoke interest, laughter, empathy, and at the end, horror. It was also relevant in a contemporary way: by the time it was staged after its Festival victory, the Easter Attacks and the anti-Muslim pogroms had imputed fresh nuances of meaning, context, and relevance to the production. Compare that with the barrage of middle class existentialism most Sinhala plays throw up at the Wendt and Elphinstone!
If we are to have a flourishing drama culture, we must have school societies which do not tolerate and indeed tries to exterminate mediocrity
In theatre what counts, for the most, is what can be projected out loud. If subtlety doesn’t exist, be it a school or professional production, it’s because subtlety has to be sacrificed in a live performance. This is apparent even when one compares a stage production with a film adaptation; since there have not been many filmed stage productions in Sri Lanka (barring the Jayamanne-Rukmani Devi films, which were too amateurish, loud, and staccato to merit serious discussion, and a more serious venture like Desa Nisa, which at the time of its release was virtually ignored) we can’t hope to make an analogy in here, but even a cursory examination would be enough to make clear the fact that staged productions from elsewhere are limited in scope and potential in ways that filmed theatre is not.
However, while in Sri Lanka hardly any play has been filmed, there are syncretic links between theatre and cinema. The latter has to often rely on the former for its reserve of actors, writers, even directors; as such we get, for better or worse, the same guys doing theatre doing cinema. Since there are no cinema guilds or societies in schools, the idea of cinema borrows from the theatre. What happens, less often now than before, is that students rationalise the theatre in terms of devices employed in the cinema. I say “less often now than before” with confidence, but also with trepidation; it’s not often that one comes across students approaching the task of writing a movie script as they would a theatre script, but I have come across them and they are certainly not rare.
In the end, partly because of a lack of imaginative and partly because there’s really nothing much to see in what’s offered in our halls and theatres, the aspiring student of cinema resorts to the same clichés he’s taught onstage. If it’s a love story, for instance, the lovers find each other through a series of coincidences that follow almost the exact same pattern: a forgotten purse or wallet, an accident, a misunderstanding, or a random encounter at night which leaves no room for explanation except the assumption that the two are ordained by destiny to fall for each other. If it’s an action thriller, which our commercial cinema never gets enough of, there’s at least a whiff of South India somewhere. And if it’s a mystery-suspense-detective thriller, the “mystery” gets revealed in the second half because in his eagerness to reveal everything, the director shoots everything in plain sight.
Newness: This is lacking in the Sinhala play. School productions, I wrote two years ago, reflect what’s good and bad, what’s genuine and false, in professional productions, so I think it’s only fair to lay part of the blame on our administrators and teachers who emphasise on the emphatic, the expressive, the plain and obvious for all to see, in what’s staged in our schools. The need to be profound dominates if not predominates: that is why most school skits I come across substitute for the virtues of coherence, cohesion, and clarity the vices of cacophony, obscurantism, and overtly loud background music. It’s as though the more instruments you play, the more profound and deeply felt your production becomes; as though the louder you are in the delivery of lines, the clearer your production becomes. Again, this is what distinguished Grease Yaka Returns, as well as Picket Republic, the Garage Shows, and of course the understated but un-profound Dracula(from 2015): if there was cacophony and if there were witty one-liners in them, it’s because the situation demanded that there be so.
The rift between English and Sinhala theatre in that sense is, if not should be, bridged by a bilingual theatre incorporating the best experiences from both worlds. It’s not entirely a new genre – bilingual theatre has always been there, from the time of H. C. N. de Lanerolle’sMudliyar cycle of plays right through Dramsoc, Stage and Set, and Ananda Drama today – but ever since the post-1956 cultural shift there has been a widening, rather than narrowing, gap between the two languages. This is not an indictment on post-1956 (after all, pre-1956 was in many respects worse: barely five percent of the country was fluent in English, and a bilingual intelligentsia, if one could call it that, emerged only after free education), but rather the failure to realise some of the gains that post-1956 attempted to realise. The lowering of cultural standards after 1978, not to mention the war, further widened the gap between Sinhala/Tamil and English. No doubt the post-war cultural shift narrowed it, but more important was the reintroduction of English medium education.
However, none of this will be adequate if students, and teachers, do not open themselves up to new experiences. The Sinhala theatre is caught in a rut: middle class muddles, conflict and identity, and the evanescent love triangle all predominate in it. Vittorio de Sica is once reported to have said that the only real drama of the middle class was adultery; this is as true for post-war Sri Lanka as it would have been for post-war Italy, the point being that in a context where adults return to the same dramatic tropes in the Sinhala theatre, one can’t expect students to experiment beyond these bounds. But then an inability to work within certain formal constraints itself can’t exonerate the latter.
Even when students want to try something new – a superhero movie – they do so from the standpoint of conventional Sinhala theatre. To be sure, a superhero movie remains a distant possibility as far as the Sri Lankan cinema is concerned, but until this year sci-fi was also such a possibility, and we have two big flicks – the ambitiously conceived Suparna and the low key Triton – in the offing and about to be released. Hope, in that sense, hasn’t been completely lost. But there’s obviously much more to be done. And what’s more to be done should be done not by teachers and bureaucrats, but by students and amateurs. In other words, there needs to be a revolt from within school theatre.
Who will lead this revolt? Is there anyone brave enough? If so, they need to step forward soon.