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| Sunday, 05 March 2006 |
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Drama addict's D R E A M Three cheers! (whistle, clap) Bravo and all that... An evening of clean comedy! Horu samaga Heluwen has all the kicks by Aditha Dissanayake "In my view, what we have around us is a dead theatre for dead people..." wrote Dario Fo, in The Tricks of the Trade in 1987.
Jailed, beaten, threatened with assassination, denied visa to enter the U.S.A till 1986, but finally awarded the Nobel Literature Prize in 1997, had he seen Prasanna Vithanage's Horu samaga Heluwen at the Elphinstone Theatre, Fo would have been happy to realize his statement "No one is more dead (than dramatists)..incapable of producing anything other than literary texts with grand speeches full of elaborately patterned phrases chasing and devouring each other", is no longer true. In Horu samaga Heluwen, Prasanna Vithanage presents two of Fo's less known plays (The Death of an Anarchist and We won't Pay, We wont Pay being the more popular) using laughter as a weapon against social hypocrisy. In the first of the two plays, on a stage which looks like a picture for an advertisement in a glossy magazine, because it has everything, from a grandfather clock to bookshelves,cutlery, etc (contrasting heavily with the bare stages of the by-gone era, Manel Jayasena hanging onto the welpalama in Hunuwataye Kathawa comes to mind) Vithana presents the simple truths, the serious simple truths that make up great comedy. When the mayor brings his mistress home, she wants to talk with him about his childhood... he wants to jump into bed with her. When she implores him to be straight in whatever he does he tells her "O.K I will be straight. But to be so we have to go immediately into the bedroom". Like how Jonathan Swift says in The Intelligencer "although some things are too serious, solemn or sacred to be turned into ridicule, yet the abuse of them are certainly not..." the play focuses on how marriage laws are grossly broken by those who are supposed to uphold the moral values of society, while as irony will have it, the thief who has no scruples about committing almost all the offences that come under the penal code, nevertheless remains faithful to his wife "because they got married in a church". In "One was Nude and One Wore Tails", through the conversation between the two street sweepers, the playwright focuses on people who are hungry not only for food, but for dignity and for justice - a street-sweeper who has enough intelligence to earn himself a doctorate, had the circumstances been different, asks his colleague "Have you heard of yoga?" to which his colleague responds with "who is she?". "You are not very intelligent" he says next. "You can't understand much of what is going on around the world. You are very lucky". Giving a glimpse into why Fo's more popular plays were banned by the Vatican, the street-sweeper (Saumya Liyanage) who is convinced that - he is dumb, and that being dumb equals negation, negation equals wholeness, wholeness equals divinity, therefore he is God, asks "Does the Pope know I am God?" It's no secret that comedy is much more harder to bring off than tragedy, and that anything meant to be funny can still fall flat, because everything depends on every word, every gesture... Yet, with vivid and intelligent direction from Prasanna Vithana, with a first class backing from the cast who are surely every director's dream, Horu samaga Heluwen has the ability to grab the audience and whisk them into incredible and insensible laughter, from the moment the curtains are raised to the very last line, and at whip-crack speed. Even though there are times, when the events look too wild and fantastical, (a minister "caught-in-the-act" who jumps naked into a dustbin instead of taking the conventional way out by hiding under the bed) when you think deep about them, they begin to seem more true and less absurd than what you take for granted in real life. Here is superbly crafted drama to give you side-splitting laughter, probably rolling on the aisles, not simply during the performance but for days to come. But, the question remains. Is Horu samaga heluwen good? The answer is no. It's superb. |
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