Maname: Continuation of the same production:

Does it appeal to the contemporary audience
 

by Ranga Chandrarathne

Maname and Sinhabahu are beyond doubt the most famous theatrical adaptations of Nadagam by Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra. They are also considered as masterpieces in the Sinhala theatre, as they were produced after meticulous research into the folk-drama which existed, at the time, in the form of Nadagam.

Nadagama, a rudimentary form of drama, being influenced by Indian and Tamil folk dramas, has been staged on an oval-shaped threshing podium 'Kamata' after a bounty harvest of paddy to calm down the weary souls of the farm hands.

A Nadagama is staged overnight and is therefore, a long performance full of witty dialogues as well as a lot of story telling. However, Maname which is an outcome of a meticulous and arduous research, has been greatly influenced by the folk-drama traditions of the day and Nadagam, Tamil traditional dance forms such as Kooththu as well as Indian and Japanese traditional theatre like No and Kabuki which Professor Sarachchandra studied.

Salient characteristics

The process of the theatrical adaptation of Maname Nadagama into a modern drama took place at the Peradeniya University at a time stage plays were produced in English by Professor Ludowyk. One of the salient characteristics of the modern rendering of Maname was the Pote Gura or the Chronicler who would introduce the scenes to be unfolding on the stage and the chorus of singers.

Professor Ashley Halpe commenting on the Sinhala Theatre and Maname says 'Sinhala theatre had so far oscillated between the derivative showiness of the Nrtya and the charming mixture of farce and sentimentality concocted by B.A.W. Jayamanne and the like.

Ironically, the basis and the inspiration of the Nrti developed by the Parsee theatre company which brought the form to this country was Victorian melodrama, though Sri Sangabo and Vessantara appropriated the Nrti, assimilating the form to the Buddhist revival.

On the other hand we have the Jayamanne plays such as Kaedavunu Poronduva (The Broken Promise) and Kapati rakshakaya (The Wicked Guardian) which were a mixture of the broadest slapstick and the sentimental melodrama aptly represented by the songs of Rukmani Devi.

Frequenters of the English-language theatre had access to a much wider range of theatrical experience from Plautus to Wilde and Shakespeare to Pirandello and O'Neill, including Shudraka (The Little Clay Cart) and Hsiung (Lady Precious Stream) in English translation.

Yet, it seems distinctly odd in that context that the original drama of H.C.N. de Lanerolle the Mudaliyar plays, and S.J.K. Crowther The Dowry Hunter and the semi-original He Comes From Jaffna of E.F.C. Ludowyk should have harked back in dramaturgy, and attitudes to character and society, to the comedy of Gogol such as The Government Inspector and the 'jests' of Chekov.

Perhaps this was because of their assessment of the capacities of the audiences of the thirties and the forties and their modest view of their own abilities.

Similar feelings and views seem to have animated Professor Sarachchandra and his colleagues in the Sinhala Ranga Sabha when they sought to create a modern Sinhala drama, for they started by adapting Gogol's The Government Inspector as Rahas Komasaris and Marriage as Kapuva Kapothi.

So their antidote to religio-historical romantic drama in the nrti style was the same semi-realistic comedy, already old-fashioned in Europe, produced by de Lanerolle, Crowther and Ludowyk. Perhaps this resulted from discussions with Ludowyk for he and Mrs. Ludowyk had been invited into the Sinhala Ranga Sabha.

Audiences flocked to these plays. But when Professor Sarachchandra tried to build on this foundation for serious modern expression he reports that audiences seemed to think that anything in prose was intrinsically funny. His attempt to overcome this constraint resulted in Pabavati which is, after all, not significantly different from Sri Sangabo in its essential nature.

Extraordinary transformation

A sense of this background gives us a vivid impression of the extraordinary transformation of the Sinhala drama and theatre that Professor Sarachchandra effected with Maname. Absolutely nothing that was happening in the Sri Lankan theatre at the time or had happened in the seven decades or so of theatrical activity that had preceded Maname could have enabled audiences, dramatists, critics and theatre folk generally to imagine what the new drama would be like.

One emerges from these explorations of context with an awed understanding of the magnitude and daring of the sheer difference of Maname. One feels that Professor Sarachchandra himself must have lived through the preceding months in a state of exhilaration and exaltation, the true 'furor poeticus' and, no doubt of agonizing frustration at what Yeats called theatre business, management of men.?

Have we got so used to Maname that we cannot respond to it with an answering excitement? We have in the first place to attune ourselves to a dramatic experience with a rather special rhythm.

Professor Sarachchandra inducts us into this aesthetic world with a magnificently sure touch in the ragadari-based orchestral introduction which leads with great naturalness into the dignified cadences of Pothegura's Prologue (which Sharmon Jayasinghe handled with a fine balance of measured chant and dramatic vocalization).

With the entrance of the chorus of four women and four men the play begins to expand into a 'composite artwork' a Sinhala equivalent of the gesamkunstwerk conceptualized by Richard Wagner.

There is, however, one important difference: the poetry of the text of Maname is immeasurably superior to the libretti of Wagner.

Thus, viewed purely as a form, Maname combines music (itself a composite of classical ragadari music, folk music and the chants of the Catholic drama and hymns of the West Coast), dance and rhythmic movement, varieties of dramatic poetry from recitative to dramatic lyric using a wide range of rhetoric, costumes that are as much a feast for the eyes as the patterned movements on the stage and a rich vocabulary of controlled formal gesture and expression. Nothing like this had been seen or attempted before in this country.

The totality absorbs and focuses the audience in a powerful aesthetic geste, the rich experiential rhythms of which culminate in a poignant tragic climax. Beginning in the familiar universe of many-sided princely achievements and its due acclamation side by side with a lyric love-experience, the play intensifies into a conflict of values and a tragic dilemma.

We first see the encounter between the almost hubristic vira confidence of Prince Maname and the bold authority of the Forest King.

The conflict, passing through episodes of challenge, duel, seeming victory and sharp reversal for the prince ending in death, has a strong dramatic rhythm which give place to the pathos of the lamentation of the princess and her desperate attempt to make the best of her situation which only brings nemesis on her followed by remorse and the prospect of death.

The audience is gathered inexorably into an experience of pity and awe in the classic Greek sense, but it is also, in the final sequence, enfolded in a healing compassion and ennobling resignation as the cadences of the valediction and the final chorus draw the play to its close.

The whole experience is one of exquisitely refined theatre as well as of a heightening of moral and spiritual consciousness making the play a great creative achievement as well a landmark in Sri Lankan cultural history.

With it Professor Sarachchandra opened up a great new territory for himself and the Sinhala theatre. It is now a commonplace of Sri Lankan cultural history that after it Sinhala drama and theatre entered with a phase of exponential growth. This has included the exploration of many new possibilities and a heady openness to world drama from Sophocles to Dario Fo and is by no means over.

To be continued

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