It sounds intriguing and it’s with a sense of curiosity that the audience takes its place at a forum theatre performance presented at the British Council, Colombo by the ‘Shakthi’ theatre group. The brochure handed out tells us that the initiative began in 2008, when the British Council decided to promote the use of forum theatre in war-affected areas in the Eastern and North Central Provinces. A group of young people from both Sinhalese and Tamil communities were trained in forum theatre techniques and this was the start of the Shakthi group.
The play starts with music and movement. The performers come on stage for a short introduction and the action begins. The scene is a battlefield with people running and shouting. A woman hides, dragging a young girl after her. A man runs onto stage. Shots are fired (effectively conveyed through drumbeats) and he falls dead.
Six months later, inside a house, the woman is folding clothes and the girl is reading. They are mother and daughter and the dead man was the girl’s father. After his death they are now struggling to survive but it’s not specifically stated whether they are refugees.
The mother finds it difficult to support her children and goes abroad to work leaving her daughter Kumari, and Kumari’s sister, in their grandmother’s care. We see Kumari going to school but her life changes abruptly after she visits a friend. The friend has gone out and she is let into the house by her friend’s uncle, who is drunk. He asks her to wait for her friend, and she is assaulted and raped by him. Kumari’s family attempt to hide the incident and in spite of her protests Kumari is quickly married off to another man who is an alcoholic. He assaults her when she is pregnant resulting in her death.
In the words of the brochure, “Forum theatre is, at its core, the presentation of a short play about a serious social issue to an audience which is directly affected by that issue. The plot is scripted in a way that the worst possible outcome of that particular issue is seen.......Once the play is performed, the actors re-perform the play, but this time the audience is invited to get involved in the second performance.”
The play stays faithful to this pattern. After the first performance, two narrators explain that the play will run a second time but this time the audience can stop the action and suggest changes as to what each character should do. To make things a bit more complicated, audience members cannot change the behaviour of the ‘more powerful’ character in the scene (for example the drunken uncle in the assault scene), they can only change the behaviour of the weaker character.
The audience reaction to this is interesting. This is not something that Sri Lankan audiences are very familiar with and at first there is a slight sense of confusion. The play starts for the second time and continues up to the point where the mother and the daughter are sitting together in their house, six months after the father’s death. At this point it’s stopped by a (male) audience member. He wants, he says, to change the behaviour of the mother. Why is she so negative? She is constantly talking about the past and dwelling on the death of her husband, and this is not a good environment for her child.
He offers to act out the part of the mother in the scene, using more positive language. The attempt goes down very well considering that he’s playing a female character and acts as an effective ice breaker.
After this intervention, the play continues but is stopped at other points by audience members. Some suggest that girls need to be more aware of how to protect themselves in threatening situations. What could Kumari have done to avoid being trapped alone in an empty house with a drunk and abusive man? Having realized that the uncle was drunk, should she have refused to wait for her friend and left? Did she not understand that the situation could become threatening? At what point does innocence become dangerous?
The final intervention concerns Kumari’s family’s reactions to the rape. Instead of trying to hide the incident, Kumari’s sister (played by another audience member) insists that it be reported to the police, thus averting the final tragedy.
Not everything worked perfectly. Language was sometimes an issue. The dialogue was in both Sinhalese and Tamil, with the narrators using some English as well. Up to a point this mixing of languages was innovative and interesting. Even if the dialogue could not be entirely understood it was possible to follow what was happening. But it sometimes made audience participation difficult since the audience could not always understand what was required of them.
The performance of the entire play twice also was repetitive. Another issue, pointed out by a member of the audience was that after each intervention by the audience, the play reverted back to the original storyline which was frustrating.
Overall though, it was an extremely brave and creditable attempt on the part of the amateur performers, with the actors playing the principal narrator and the role of Kumari being particularly effective. Forum theatre creates situations that can be particularly intimidating for an actor. A successful production depends greatly on the interaction between the performers and the trust they have in each other, something that is achieved through hours of rehearsing together. By bringing audience members onto the stage, an unknown actor is introduced whose actions are entirely unpredictable. In spite of this the cast has to be able to react convincingly to them.
The performers should be commended for attempting to use all three languages. Sometimes this made communication difficult but this was a timely reminder of the language barriers that still exist in Sri Lanka. At one point the (Tamil) narrator explained the terms of forum theatre and what the audience was required to do. He spoke mostly in Tamil, with a few Sinhalese sentences. Most of the audience understood Sinhalese and English, but not Tamil. Caught up in the enthusiasm of his narration he did not seem to realise this. At the end he stood waiting, puzzled and disappointed by this lack of feedback.
The audience was eager to interact but could not respond. Both sides were at a loss. Seeing this, another actor stepped forward. They have not understood, he said, and translated into Sinhalese. Only after this did the play proceed. Nothing could have illustrated the situation in Sri Lanka better. |
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