Methodist College gears up to present ‘Fruitcake’
Last year, when the Methodist College cast of Desert Places restaged their winning Interschool Drama Competition production, it was for an all-important audience of parents and teachers. Following the short play a lengthy question and answer session was flooded with questions for students. Parents, teachers and other older audience members seemed surprised-who knew school could be this hard?
Ruvin De Silva
It’s easy to laugh things off when you’re older, observes director Ruvin De Silva. “I had trouble at school,” he remembers. “Most kids do. Now it seems very trivial but at that age it’s everything.” Next week his young cast will restage their short play as a much longer one at the British School Auditorium and Ruvin, finds himself in the directorial seat again. The premise is a personal favourite which he intended to develop on (“we don’t develop on existing scripts enough here, we just go straight on to the next one”) for the young director.
When he was asked to direct last year’s play for the annual Interschool Drama Competition he “wanted to make something from scratch,” he says. “I’m never good with scripts and we played around with ideas for ages before coming up with this one.” Once conceptualized, it seemed like a natural thing to be talking about in a school play.
Ideas began flowing in from everywhere. “These guys were very vocal,” he says. “We got a lot of material from the cast itself, and the school allowed us to place a suggestion box for other students to write to us anonymously about problems they had. We began hearing back from students about peer pressure, bullying, neglect, even about being compared to their friends by parents and about friendships breaking up. It was a good starting point.”
Expanding on last year’s material, with some new characters and stories woven into the plotline, Desert Places is renamed and restaged as ‘Fruitcake’ by the school this year. Set in an all-female psych ward the play explores the daily lives of its patients. “It’s not a sensitive play” says Ruvin “because what we’re talking about is really not very sensitive. It’s about labels and how easily we use those labels on people.”
Fruitcake is devised theatre in that it is unscripted and very much an ongoing process. “It’s been really interesting to work with this type of theatre,” says cast leader Shamika Kulasingham, 18. “We make the script as we go along and that allows us to discuss these problems with a much wider scope.” Shamika and her fellow cast members put in a fair amount of groundwork for the play; “all the characters have been developed from personal experience and research,” she tells us. They’ve now got a good grasp on the important issues. “We want it to be very relevant and have an impact,” she says. “We want people to think about where they stand.”
Teacher-in-charge Amanda Van Eyck alongside other familiar faces from local theatre, such as Pasan Ranaweera and Yashodha Suriyapperuma have been pillars of support say both Shamika and Ruvin. The play will feature original music by Gihan Seneviratne. ‘Fruitcake’ is on at the British School Auditorium on May 29 and 30 from 7.30pm.