Sarachchandra’s “timeless” sentinels
There was once a place, named the Arts Centre Club. It was of the Lionel Wendt theatre, and on many an evening going late into the night, there the imagination was helped to run freely.
As I remember from long ago, Professor of Physics, Osmund Jayaratne was like all of the others in the gathering at the Club that night,
A production of Maname
in good spirits to engage in fantastic thoughts. He was an accomplished actor from the days of Professor E.F.C. Ludowyk, but that night his inspiration came from Physics. The area of discussion was the criticism about Sarachchandra’s use of creativity to fashion dramas, out of the Nadagama,transformed by him using the medieval Noh theatre of Japan which was possibly derived from the classical Sanskrit tradition. It was said that this ancient structure of theatre mainly able to convey individual relationships however profound, was out of joint with modern times with all its social problems. It would not lead the way to a National Sinhala drama with successive generations.
Osmund Jayaratne’s reaction, with laughter in high spirits, was intriguing. To say that Maname and Sinhabahu were created in 1956 and 1961 may be a pointless statement. This could be so because of profound uncertainties in physics, about Time.
He explained as we gaped and gulped.
One theory of Time, he said, is that it is a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view. Time is actual. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of stream that events and objects “move through”, nor to any entity that “flows”, but that it is instead part of a fundamental mental structure, something the human mind has created, within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, is in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz, the German mathematician.
Maname and Sinhabahu may not have been placed by Sarachchandra into the assumed stream of time in 1956 and 1961, he conjectured, but were absorbed into the collective cultural complex of Lanka,which may not have a dimension of linear time; so to talk of the dates of Maname and Sinhabahu may be irrelevant, in that they may belong, time independent, to the culture of Lanka. That these plays, will continue to attract audiences, like those of Kalidasa, Sophocles and Shakespeare, is what is relevant. “We may really not know what is meant by TIME, so you can regard these works of Sarachchandra, simply as Lanka’s Classical plays”, he said, as we poured ourselves another drink.
As the night wore on, I think it was Ranil Deraniyagala, then teaching Stage Design at the Aquinas University College Theatre School, who asked “ Yes, Sarachchandra our Kalidasa, but when will our Ibsen come and our Chekhov ? ” Ranil implied that some prose dramatists in Sinhala, despite their criticisms of the content of musical dance verse drama bySarachchandra, had yet to show a play that could compare with Maname or Sinhabahu in magnitude of dramatic scope and power.
Sinhabahu early days: Malini Ranasinghe, Nissanka Diddeniya and Yasodara Sarachchandra
Gunasena Gallapathy, playwright and Director, insisted that Maname and Sinhabahu are crucially functional in determining the arrival of a prose drama as great as these poetic works. These two plays had capacities unique to themselves to be able to determine the path of Sinhala drama in the future, of whatever genre. They would stand as magnificently wrought, burnished sentinels in stylized posture, at the beginning of a yet scattered rubble way of varied material awaiting form and interior life as the way of the Sinhala prose drama.
What gives Maname its status as world drama while remaining vitally Sinhala, is Sarachchandra’s using the Sinhala Nadagama medium to explore themes and situations which the Sinhalese would feel as belonging to them but are also of the whole world, of the human condition.
What is this theme and situation?
We were reminded of Professor D.M. de Silva’s thrilling response to Maname.
Maname is “A vision of innocence, passion and all the possible splendour of life laid waste by a vast evil which cannot be understood but is present and fulfils itself in the intricate motions of human impulse and the obscure variety of involving circumstance“ –D.M.de Silva.
තේරුම් ගත නොහැකි මුත් තදාත්මකව පවතින සහ මානව සිතගියාවේ සංකීර්ණ චලිතයන් සහ ඈදුණු තත්වයන් හි අපැහැදිලි විවිධත්වය තුල මනස්ක්ප්රප්ත වන මහා නපුරකින් සෝදා පාලුවට යන අවහින්සකත්වයේ,ලාලසාවේ සහ ජිවිතයේ සකල අසිරියේ විදර්ශනාවක් (දැක්මක්)
“Sarachchandra’s response to the great mystery of evil is not mere bafflement but reverence, an acknowledgement of the littleness of human judgement when faced with the mystery of evil and a refusal therefore to ascribe too easily to any man or woman his or her portion of guilt. Sarachchandra’s vision is frightening, and he feels not anger, but pity”- D.M.de Silva.
Sentinals, this play and Sinhabahu are because no form and content will they allow to pass, realist dialogue drama or otherwise, lesser than they are. In time Sinhala prose drama will find creators as great as Sarachchandra was in the poetic musical dance form. This spoken prose drama, yet to come, will be able to stand facing Maname and Sinhabahu, not in competition but in empathy because its external conventions of realism will be internally lofty with mythological, symbolic and ritual reference. It could well be that the State or some other organization will take a hand in cultivating prose drama in Sinhala. Possibly, a committee can begin by setting up the wherewithal for a worthy translation and study of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters”, two lines from the ending of which I use to conclude, this statement of hope which springs from the creations of Ediriweera Sarachchandra.
“. . . See, that tree is dead, but it waves in the wind with the others. And so it seems to me that if I die I’ll still be part of life, one way or another. Good-bye…… Those papers of yours you gave me are lying under the calendar on my table.”