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Frank to the
boot Complete with an original soundtrack by one of Colombo's favourite rock bands, Stigmata, young playwright Delon Weerasinghe's Royal Court Theatre acclaimed play, goes on the boards this weekend All these problems
would have been sorted out if we had just bombed Jaffna, runs a
line in the play. Well, something very much like that. I couldn't
take it down because I was stunned, not really because it was a
startling opinion to overhear, rather because it was so frank. And
that's the thing about this play, its frankness.
This
is Delon Weerasinghe's type of interactive theatre. "You tell
the audience a story they can relate to, one they feel they've been
through; you make it real". His play is one that makes you
feel almost like you're intruding on someone else's space, like
a visitor who decided to drop by at the wrong time. Complete with
an original soundtrack (including a title track) by one of Colombo's
favourite rock bands, Stigmata, Delon's Royal Court Theatre acclaimed
play, goes on the boards this weekend. Thicker than Blood is the
story of an army officer, Suresh, prematurely retired on account
of being wounded in war. Hailed as a 'hero', he becomes the unwilling
martyr for not the most noble of causes. As the play progresses,
he comes to a point at which he must decide, as the playwright puts
it, if he is willing to sell his soul to bury his ghost. The beginnings
of Thicker than Blood lie in a one-act play that "just sat
there" for a very long time. Written when Delon was 16, the
script traces the story of a soldier who meets an old man; a meeting
that changes the way the soldier views the world. For Delon, this
was not the best of scripts - "I felt the subject matter was
naive and I no longer believed in the values I had written about."
But when the Royal Court Theatre called for scripts for a workshop
they intended to conduct, which would bring together Asian writers,
this was dug up as a "sample of previous writing". It
became the script that earmarked Delon to attend the Royal Court
International Residency in 2001. "That was an amazing learning
experience. The shape of the play I owe to the people at the Royal
Court," says Delon who went from being " a person who'd
never written anything serious in his life" to a playwright
working with a team of recognised writers, directors and actors.
After
about a year of working on the script, Delon's 'soldier' had a story:
but it was not just a story about the separatist war. Particularly
significant, in this respect, is the role the soldier plays as father
figure to his rather volatile nephew. "I think I am the symbol
of how the break up of a family can affect a child. I am alienated
from my father and so I reach out to my uncle who seems to understand
me," says Suranjith Tillakewardene who plays a teenager, not
very different from himself. "Although at one level I play
a normal seventeen-year-old and can relate to the experimenting
and the rebelling side to my role, in the larger context of what
I represent, it becomes a little more complex." A complex play
it is, but not a complicated one. It's, as the playwright himself
stresses, a very, very ordinary play about relationships. Says Mohammed
Adamally, who plays Suresh's brother Harsha who, having built up
for himself a successful law practice gives it all up for a career
in politics, "Though the play relates to something bigger,
it is built on the relationships." For him, more than the storyline,
it is these myriad relationships and the individual nature of each
relationship that is striking. "My character, for example,
is dominant, even somewhat ugly when it comes to dealing with the
wife, submissive with the uncle and dictatorial with the son: The
nature of each relationship affects, even heightens the mood of
the play." Although nothing
that takes place in the play is accidental, there came a point when
the characters were "just saying the lines". "I didn't
give them any lines. All I did was just create the situation,"
says the writer, who also happens to be director and actor as well.
This three-way role is not the ideal situation, admits Delon, and
not particularly what he wanted for his play. It just happened,
he says, as a result of a series of coincidences. "Not to have
it go through three different people means I am losing three different
points of view that would have enriched the play." Still, the
play is enriched, with the strong cast and their lucid interpretations
of character. One of them is Romany Parakrama. Hers is the sole
female role in this very "male play", yet she feels it's
a substantial one that has captured a very Sri Lankan middle class
woman who has to deal with the expectations and pressures of society.
She portrays, "an educated woman, who puts a successful career
on hold to concentrate on her family and is eventually left with
nothing. She holds together the unit that comprises herself, a husband
who does not talk to her and a son who is difficult. A story not
very different from the average woman who comes to the point where
she no longer can or wants to hold the unit together, because no
one cares." Writing a story
is a strange thing, says Delon. Apparently you don't just think
up a good story, just like that; you have lots of ideas, which you
don't throw out, but instead work out where exactly it fits. Well,
that's what he does. His objective: Giving people an experience.
Thicker than
Blood opens on September 12 and continues till September 15 at the
British Council. Tickets are available at the British Council Arts
Office. The play is more suitable for mature audiences. |
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