Dark excess – Arts
There is a word to describe the encounter with Jehan Aloysius’ latest work with CentreStage Productions, and that is “excessive”. Reality Show two weekends ago caught up, twisted, and shelled its audience with so much of all that makes the theatre that it was almost too much. But outside of its own (literal and metaphorical) playground, in the world of Sri Lankan theatre production, the work just made a significant step forward for culturally relevant English-language plays in Sri Lanka.
The curtain opens on seven wanna-be TV stars stumbling into an audition for the Reality Show. Sewwandi, Bandara, Wimal, Michael, Rohan, Samantha and Shanthi are everyman, only wanting their moment of glory. But they soon find out that this show (called “reality”) is played out for the entertainment of a higher power that dictates the terms of their time on stage. “I AM WHO I AM. THIS IS MY STAGE,” the voice of the unseen “director” roars at the hopeful players, crushing their dreams and betraying a text run mostly along predictable lines.
From the get-go the cast was hyper-active, sometimes even delivering lines in only thinly-veiled nervousness. But the voice (Sean Amarasekara), so menacing, so sweet, so flippant, so serious, so ugly and so beautiful all at the same time rendered the predictability of the text and busyness of the action forgivable.
Jehan seems to love – and is undeniably very good at – doing clever things, and so the play was full of these. Fancy lighting, original music, shadow play, dancing, singing, theatre games and much else all got packed into this production. They even brought the audience on stage (because they “always judge but never act”) and put some carnivalesque scenes in too. The choreography especially was very dramatic, demanding some serious levels of work from the cast.
Scenes from the show. Pix by Dilanjan Seneviratne
The actors Dimitri Gunatilake, Niren Ranasinghe, Damien Fernando, Yasas Ratnayake, Feroze Ahamed, Chalana Wijesuriya and Udani Perera stepped up to the mark in style. Parts of the production were work-shopped and apparently autobiographical in nature, making it not only physically but also emotionally incredibly demanding. The players all have some, though not great, amounts of experience with big productions, and this was evident in lines which occasionally came out rehearsed and somewhat loose action. It’s not an easy task for seven players to bear the equal burden of a full-length play, and they all seemed to pull their weight without slack.
Each “character” took a turn to tell the story of his or her past, making it as juicy and as dark as possible, to please the “director”. From rape to war to gender to language to identity and the victorious victim (or the victimized victor?), they spun and they weaved, story after tale, often in lengthy monologues backed cleverly by enactments of the other players, to win the approval of the voice. The experience was visually, auditorily, emotionally and intellectually overwhelming.
They are all “regular” characters while Shanthi alone is the “loony” from the beginning. Towards the last third of the play though, after being defeminized, identity-stripped and figuratively raped, she becomes lethal in her silence. Everyone else wants their turn in the spotlight, to tell their story, but now she only sits, tormented. Probably because Jehan knows his audience better than the singular viewer hoping for subtlety and the unspoken “message,” Shanthi suddenly opens her mouth and then doesn’t stop, taking over the final parts of the play with her story of the boy with rainbow-colored wings. Shanthi’s story is funny and light and hopeful, unlike the deep, dark tormentations the others choose to retell.
They each started off as beautifully individual characters, biting each other and sharp. By the time the “audition” is finished, they are rendered so alike, literally knotted together, bound. Then, the show may begin, and the audience must decide how it shall go. To whom do these stories belong? Who tells them and who hears? What remains untold and what do we not hear? How shall we respond? The questioning voices are what the audience took home.
Reality Show is not new thinking, nor is it familiar thinking in cleverly devised garb. What the play is to Sri Lankan theatre is much more practical than progressive. It goes without saying that the few directors like Jehan Aloysius who participate in both local and English language theatre forums are in a unique position to bring the freshness and relevance of local language theatre to the English-language stage, and the hype and at least part of the (let’s face “reality” here) financial viability of the English-language theatre to the local language stage. Reality Show is the addition of another relevant and thought-provoking work to the Sri Lankan English-language theatre scene, a valuable step towards bridging the best of both worlds.
We learn that the ensemble cast of Reality Show is bilingual and may in future explore linguistically more versatile versions of the play. The prospect of a whole company of players (no matter that they are small in number) conversant in the exchanges of both (very different) audiences is bursting with possibilities, and it is exciting to anticipate what they will make of it (if they do make anything of it!), not simply as individual players and a collective production group, but as stakeholders in the Sri Lankan theatre scene.