G.K. Haththotuwegama was one of the most brilliant, versatile and creative individuals to pass through the halls of academe at the University of Peradeniya. First as a student, in the honours programme of the English Department; then as an inspiring teacher in that same department, and finally moving out to explore far wider fields in performance and theatre where his richest contributions were made. Although a brilliant student with an enormously critical mind he found the constraints of academia and its scholarship too rigid for his quicksilver personality. So for years though he drifted in and out of academia, inspiring and deeply transforming the lives of the students who happened to be in his classes at any given time, his passion and his unswerving commitment were to the world of theatre and the wider public to which his works were directed.

For G.K. the teacher, the incisive critic (for whom there were no holy cows,) the journalist who reviewed film and drama for the newspapers and above all the social activist who through his work as creator, director, producer and actor in street theatre — a genre he introduced to provinces and villages all over the island, these many sided interests were but parts of his single persona. Money and fame fast becoming the pervasive values of the changing society around him, never touched him. G.K. the maverick intellectual, was equally at home discussing literature, politics or media events with the finest minds in the field, or drinking tea and chatting in remote village homes when he took his dynamic street theatre to touch the hearts and minds of simple people whose problems and emotions he so powerfully portrayed. His was a quicksilver, effervescent genius. He left no scholarly oeuvre of his writings.

His incisive critical pieces were scattered here and there in motley journals or newspapers. His brilliant theatre pieces, which he wrote, directed and acted in, for innumerable street theatre performances, were equally ephemeral. I had urged him to record them on video, to get the University departments of Literature or Fine Arts, or some TV channel to do so – for posterity –but he never had the money, nor the interest in name and fame to spend time hunting for sponsors. He did what he did on shoe-string budgets, or the occasional support of a friend or relative who valued and appreciated his work.

This volume is an attempt by many who knew him and worked with him, as students, actors, colleagues and friends, to put together some record of the work and creative genius of the man.

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