TV Times

TV Times

‘Diriya Mawa’ on stage
Henry Jayasena's landmark Sinhala adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's seminal anti-war drama, ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ (Diriya Mawa Saha Ege Daruwo) with a cast largely comprising tsunami-affected youth will go on the boards at the end of March at the Lionel Wendt.

The play will feature award-winning veteran screen and stage actress Anoja Weerasinghe in the lead. The play will take place at the Wendt from 31 March to 2 April. Brecht's play follows the story of Anna Frieling, nicknamed ‘Mother Courage’, a clever, devious canteen woman with the Swedish Army determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children, Swiss Cheese, Eilif, and Kattrin, to the same war from which she sought to profit.

It is one of nine plays that Brecht wrote in an attempt to counter the rise of Fascism and Nazism. The play, directed by Sue Weston and produced under the banner of Anoja Weerasinghe's Abhina Academy of Performing Arts is sponsored by HSBC and is the culmination of an exhaustive HSBC-led Programme of tsunami rehabilitation titled "Trauma to Triumph", that involved theater, drama and performance as healing tools for those suffering psychological trauma following the tsunami that ravaged Sri Lanka's coastlines on 26 December 2004.

HSBC teamed with Weerasinghe's Abhina Foundation last year (2005) in sponsoring and help run a series of psycho-social drama workshops, where the veteran actress and her group toured all parts of the island, running theatre-based workshops for those traumatized by disaster and conflict.

Workshops were held in the South, East and West of Sri Lanka at 10 centres which drew crowds of children and youth, who were given constructive tools with which to deal with loss, grief, trauma and anger through drama, showing them a road to inner healing and peace through drama therapy and performance art, effectively giving them catharsis through theatre.

On witnessing these children and youth now, it is hard to imagine what they would have been going through, their road to healing through drama showing great promise. The workshops took place during a span of three months in the latter part of 2005.

From the large pool of potential talent that attended these workshops, Anoja hand-picked 21 of the most promising actors from these sessions, and brought them to Colombo for an intense, advanced one-month workshop in December.
For Abhina, this would be their second theatre project using tsunami-affected participants, the other being Edinburgh Festival award-winning "Children of the Sea", which is currently touring Sri Lanka following its successful run in Scotland. The Music for "Mother Courage" is Created by Premasiri Khemadasa.

Top