Review

Men without Shadows:

Gauging the ‘shadowless’

By Dilshan Boange

[Part 2]

In this continuation from last week of the review of the stage play Men without Shadows which marked the directorial debut of Sashane Perera on February 7 at the Lionel Wendt, I will focus on an aspect of stagecraft and discuss the characterisation of the captives performed by the players.

Stagecraft

A two-storeyed stage, a double stage proscenium, a two-layered theatre space, came to be revealed from the darkness as the action switched scenes. The audience responded with a subtly heard gasp of awe at what was spectacular for the ingenuity in stagecraft and boldness in terms of technical risk taking that was demonstrated.

The manner in which the performance space was devised to serve as a two-storeyed stage, a suspended stage overhead from the ‘boards’ of the Wendt, where the scenes of the interrogations and the overall premise of the antagonists was situated, showed a directorial vision on the part of Sashane Perera that must be applauded and admired.

It added an appreciable richness to the texture of the play on the visual front and showed imaginativeness in creativity and boldness in technical innovation. The switching of scenes was more expeditiously achieved due to this innovation with a more imaginative utilisation of space.

The effect of it on the viewer affected through the eye, is that the full width of the stage was delivered optimally for both ‘spaces’ –the cell in which the rebels are held, and the interrogation space where the military men occupy as their designated place.

Had the stage been vertically divided to form the two different spaces on a single platform, the effect each scene could project upon the sight of the viewer through the visual medium would have been far less impactful.

Chickera’s craft

From those on-wstage that evening, Gihan de Chikera with his years of acting in both Sinhala and English theatre productions could be very reasonably called the veteran on the cast. I will not pretend that I am thorough with de Chickera’s craft as an actor as to insinuate that I have seen every single role he has played in his career in theatre thus far.

But I can say for the record that I have seen him bring to life characters in several plays. The plays Veeraya Marila, Aadra Wasthuwa, Dolahak, and Kalumaali are all works of theatre which de Chickera has acted in playing roles which of course have varying degrees of ‘stage time’ for him to deliver his performance and mark his stage presence.

From all the roles I have seen him play on-stage thus far I am convinced that the character of Jean he was cast in by Sashane Perera is possibly the most psychologically loaded character that de Chickera has yet been handed.

I say this because Jean’s character, given his circumstances of the interests and responsibilities he has to contend with, which are both personal as Lucy’s lover and a human being in general, and official as the leader of the group of resistance fighters, ensconced in the time and space constraint that they are all caught in, has the potency to portray varying degrees of emotional distress and inner dilemmatic conflicts more than any of the other male roles.

The inner conflicts within Jean’s character could be expected to contain signs of being nerve battered and dilemmatic yet controlled strenuously being under constant pressure from both within and due to the pressure indirectly nuanced to his subconscious from his followers through the professed faith they have in him, to give reason and credence for them to continue to struggle for a worthy cause.

Credibility

An adroit shifting of gears, perhaps not always mercurially but with sensible jaggedness would best give credibility to Jean’s portrayal to reflect the psychological constitution borne by him. Did de Chickera achieve this? Was his performance acceptable? I would say yes.

But did he or for that matter the directorial hand responsible for moulding his movement exploit to the maximum the potential of this character to be optimal in performance? I would say no.

There was some inhibition that I believe I sensed in de Chickera in giving voice and movement to Jean. It was as if though he contained himself in his expressiveness to a point where it was almost as if for fear of turning melodramatic at the wrong moment and going overboard with the theatrics.

But in my personal opinion the result was that he underplayed the role. It was as if he was on the defensive from himself for fear of doing wrong to the character of Jean.

Theatre isn’t the big screen and a player on-stage cannot expect all his character’s subtleties and finely nuanced expressions of the physique and vocal chords to be captured in full measure by an audience whose ‘proximity to perceive’ varies inside the theatre, and therefore since no retakes can be possible in theatre, an actor’s propensity to withhold that ‘pulse’ to become ‘projectile’ at times may result in a form of self defeatism when seeking to realise ‘performance potential’.

However, it must be noted that in all fairness to de Chickera and the director, the character of Jean was surely the most challenging to conceive onstage given the politics he is posited in that demands of him a psychology that is in flux and also in transition with a rotational succession of these two mental attributes more than the other characters.

Gehan Blok

The first time I saw Gehan Blok performing in a work of theatre was in ‘The War Reporter’ directed by Ruhanie Perera and Jake Oorloff, which was presented in a non-proscenium form at the German cultural Centre in 2010.

Although I cannot recall today his performance in that play, the character that Blok brought to life onstage in ‘Men without Shadows’ on the February 7 was compellingly delivered with hardly a ‘hair out of place’ or ‘step out of tune’. If one may offer the expressions to denote the level of precision his craft showed, proving he was composed of both the physical and mental aspects to create his character with whom a viewer may be able to sympathise despite the ignobleness of the character at making no bones about wanting to sing like a canary to simply be save his skin.

Blok’s skills being synced with the character’s ‘role’ and ‘function’ in the plot with a remarkable ‘entwinement’, he brought out more than anyone else in the cast the central thrust of energy to drive the psychological premise of the scenario.

While I believe Blok’s character was obviously not the most psychologically dichotomised in terms of his outlooks, and thereby somewhat less problematic to characterise through acting, as far as the skill to convince a viewer from the function of a player onstage goes, Blok is possibly the actor who in my opinion, came off as the best that night.

Bimsara Premaratne

The portrayal of Lucy was a performance that showed clearly the three stages of her psychology’s transformation through the narrative of the story well defined and identifiable as a character that gets reborn almost anew with different turning points. The initial Lucy was one who was optimistic that her lover the leader of their rebel band, Jean will be a source of hope that can be relied on.

She was then expressional through voice and visage of an idealist whose flame could not be doused simply by the impeding prospect of torture which had besieged Blok’s character frantically. Post interrogation Lucy was drained of all her inner spark, but firm in the spirit of adhering to her belief of the cause and the rightness to uphold that belief at whatever cost.

The Lucy who once again subtly feels a resurgence of her former humanly desire to ‘live’ and not be committed to martyrdom at the end of the story regained gradual but discernible change in her voice and visage.

Premaratne’s portrayal of Lucy was a theatricalising of a character whose foundational or primary construction of ideas does not at any point waver. It is the secondary set of emotions and ideas, views that are conditional to her surroundings and turn of events that reflected the character’s transformations at different stages. With eyes that gazed into the distance when speaking of her lover, Premaratne brought Lucy’s optimism to be visually manifest.

With stoniness in her physical being Premaratne’s voice revealed Lucy’s previously lively veins, to be petrified after the interrogators had had their time with her. The resurging spark to reach for the chance to live which, comes alive in Lucy to the end, was evinced with a face that expressed ‘self doubt’ initially and then grew to a stronger desire through being bolstered by the response of her comrades in arms.

The initiating ‘action’ of a facial expression thus found its gentle propulsion through the form of reactions in relation to the responses from the faces Lucy was allied to.

With the right dose of vocal ‘outburst’ forbidding any touch of comfort to be brought on her person when she was cast back in the cell after interrogation, and preventing any of the men from touching the corpse of her slain brother Francoise, Lucy was shown to be a woman not stripped of that essential ingredient that defines her mind and spirit, the strength of determination which yields to none but her own belief of what is correct and right. Premaratne’s performance deserves applause for what she delivered onstage on the opening night of ‘Men without Shadows’.

Chalana Wijesuriya

I first saw Chalana Wijesuriya’s acting talent come alive on the boards in ‘Time and Motion’ directed by Anushka Senanayake staged on the August 4 in 2012. His skill to dramatise a character with expressive vocal fluctuations and energetic gesticulations seemed very much in his pulse and it served him well to bring to life the sixteen year old Francoise who is caught up as a hapless victim due to his kinship with Lucy.

Francoise is drawn into the group not out of his choosing, but through the designs of the other parties who are all adults. Francoise’s character represents a very strong political statement in the whole architecture of Sartre’s play. The 16 year old boy has no designs for martyrdom nor does he admire it.

His cause is to live free from fear of harm and torture. He finds no shame in admitting that he will act contrary to the interests of patriotism or any other ennobled ideological stance made a cause to fight.

The boy is the one character who has no hand in the fight but has all of its ugliness delivered to him in the form of mental torture and then finally the physical cruelty of being ‘extinguished’ for the ‘better good’ by the very people with whom he shared a space of captivity. What is raised as a very needling question to the conscience is what really are the safety nets victims like Francoise have when embroiled as victims who never decided to pledge allegiance to either side of the battlefield? When the chips are down and your neck is on the line as the enemy stares at you poised for the kill, who is in your corner to fend off the hounds?

Jean was the one voice that deplored the move to kill the boy who was willing to divulge all the interrogators would want to know.

Interestingly it is Jean who stood to lose everything if the boy squealed. Yet Jean was only a ‘voice’ and a feeble resistor against the act of ‘silencing’ the boy which Henri carried out.

If with every bone and muscle in his body Jean wanted to actually prevent the boy from being killed, he could have done far more than what he displayed as his protest and opposition.

The boy’s crime was that he was not willing to adhere to a code of silence, but he was silenced very effectively and thereby neutralised as a threat to the common plan to keep mum.

What comes to my mind when reflecting on the hapless Francoise is something I read in the Life of Caesar written by the Roman biographer Plutarch, who says that at a certain instance when Julius Caesar was obstructed by a duty conscious Roman Tribune named Metellus from accessing the Roman treasury during Caesar’s war against Pompeii, Caesar had stated to his obstructer “War allows no free talking.” And had thereby offered the Tribune the ultimatum of either standing down, or be killed. Francoise was one who professed he would talk and freely expressed his designs to ‘talk’ when the occasion arises.

That was his sin, for which he paid the ultimate penalty. With neither the chance to live nor the claim to martyrdom to his name, Francoise suffers the most pathetic fate of all the characters in the story.

Chamath Arambewela proved himself to the best screamer in my opinion playing the role of Henri, perhaps the most redoubtable male character from the captives.

The effect of this vocal output had much symbolic significance as much as auditory effect to the whole theatre experience that evening.

Arambewela’s characterisation of Henri through performance was holistically intact and credible expect for one instance from my observations, which was the moment he realises that young Francoise had actually died from the strangulation Henri perpetrated, and reacted with an instantaneous fright like withdrawal which seemed in my personal opinion a bit too spontaneous.

The theatricality of that ‘reaction’ that is significant, and is in fact a turning point, to understand the character and his psychology if made to whizz by too suddenly, loses its potential to create a more dramatic effect to the viewer, if the viewer’s attention is not given that fine, yet sensible, ‘sliver of time’ needed to be drawn to the actor and his ‘reaction’, since until that moment the ‘action’ of strangulation is what has collected the audience’s attention as a whole.

The said action being composed of two entities and a specific act, from which the reaction and the deliverer of that reaction must be divorced if the depth of the psychology of Henri and the subsequent change that has triggered in him is to be more pronounced and better grasped by a viewer.

That particular key moment in Henri’s character’s development was not really underplayed by Arambewela but had to do with a matter of better timing.

What I saw was almost as if Arambewela was cued to make that split second change in his character, more than ‘tune in’ to a plausible reaction which must be in response to grasping the gravity of the act, and the result ‘reaped’.

The elderly looking Greek played by Dino Corera was perhaps the male who seemed the most resigned to the inescapable eventualities but also well resolved in his designs to maintain his integrity, and honour his commitment to the cause regardless of the repercussions.

Corera brought to life a persona that was convincing and had a vein to his demeanour that made him seem the male character that could draw the most empathy from a viewer.

What was perhaps partly surprising yet not wholly unthinkable of Corera’s character was the distance he was willing to go for the sake of the cause he was committed to.

The death of Francoise was concurred and passed by Henri and the Greek in unison. I wondered why the Greek did not participate in the actuation of the decision taken jointly since it was only Henri who performed the strangulation of the boy.

But the withdrawal of the Greek showed that he was not designed to participate for the sake of proving his complicity through a physical action since he will not at any point allow his conscience to claim vindication from the sin of killing the boy through an argument of lack of physical performance of the murder. He did not intend to claim a lack of guilt simply because his hands weren’t around the boy’s throat. He was not designed to be a hypocrite.

He was in that sense true to his conscience as much as heinous a conscious decision he was disposed to make under the circumstances.

Why didn’t he share the guilt of the gruesome act in fullness by putting his hands also around the boy’s throat to choke the life out of him? It wasn’t by my reading of the character portrayed by Corera, to leave all the dirty work to Henri.

It was because what needed to be done was being done, effectively at that. And there was no need to butcher the boy, simply so that the Greek may ‘show’ his deeds manifested his decision to sign Francoise’s death warrant.

Entertainment

Who or what is a man without a shadow? From the audience seated in the gentle darkness how many of the audience gave thought to a question as that I wondered.

The curtain call was not one where the cast acknowledged the adulation but presented their appearance in costume but maybe not fully out of character.

For there was a message in that as well.

Theatre although embraced by Sri Lankans principally as a premise of entertainment is something much more in terms of its potency to communicate to society and spur critical thought in the hope for social transformation.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s play brought to life by Sashane Perera and his group for theatregoers in Colombo was a story about people who are said to have no shadows.

What kind of person doesn’t have a shadow? Please give that some thought.

For my deducing leads me to think that a person who has no shadow is one who is deprived of light, confined to a perpetual darkness. Or he is one who is not touched by light; a dead man; a ghost.