Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay:

A top satirist in the making

By Dilshan Boange

I first encountered the talent Chamila Priyanka’s had to offer the realm of Sri Lankan theatre in the New Arts Theatre or the NAT as it was commonly called, in Colombo varsity. That was when I was an undergrad in the Arts Faculty and Chamila was my batch mate.

At the start of our freshman year I knew him as simply another face on campus. But in 2005, in our freshman year itself, on seeing his short play Oyai Mamai Thaniyama (You and I alone) at the NAT I realised how remarkable a dramatist this quiet and unassuming person is.

I enjoyed that short play tremendously. It had me in stitches, roaring with laughter. Those who were present that day heard an unusually sharp, robust stream of laughter, which on recurring from the audience at other comedic plays staged later on at the NAT, got dubbed ‘the horn’ by some who were greatly amused by it. And thus as time went on there were times when batch mates of mine said they knew I was in the audience watching a play that they watched since they heard ‘the horn’ erupt from the audience.

It was Chamila’s Oyai Mamai Thaniyama that elicited that fulsome laughter of mine to erupt in the NAT for the first time. His power to script and direct elements of comedy is exceptional. A day or two after watching Oyai Mamai Thaniyama I had my first chat with Chamila.

I went up to him and expressed how much I enjoyed his production. I professed I was a fan of his work. I congratulated him wholeheartedly and sincerely wished him success in his craft. That made way for what was a general familiarity to grow into a friendship over the course of our undergrad days.

Prowess

Chamila scripted and directed two works of theatre after Oyai Mamai Thaniyama. Che Saha Juliet (Che and Juliet), which I watched in the NAT during our undergrad days in 2007, and Cricket Gahanna Enawada? (Coming to play cricket?), which was after passing out of campus, which I watched at the Punchi Theatre in Borella. Those plays spoke of Chamila’s prowess as an artist. His mettle for originality is marked with story concepts that are inextricably contextualised in Sri Lankan sensibilities.

And no, his plays aren’t for ‘cheap laughs’. There is a pulsating vein of satire that forms the blood and bones of his plays. His works are critiques of our times. They have intelligent colloquial engagement, shunning garbs of pseudo intellectualism.

Occupying seat Q-7 in the gentle darkness inside the Lionel Wendt auditorium on August 20, I watched Chamila’s first feature play -Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay (This is not a gun), gain colour, form, and flesh. When looking over the whole of the work and comparing it with his short plays there is no doubt that the political critique he wishes to bring to the public discourse as an artist, now, has a somewhat fiery pulse.

There is sharper protest and outright outcry against autocracy now more than before. I felt, perhaps there is some jaggedness to the aestheticism in Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay if one considers the velocity of the ‘political tones’ it contains as compared to Chamila’s previous plays. But then one cannot chirp like a bird and hope to create a hubbub.

The content of the play contains a vast array of elements for elucidation. Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay has a ‘loaded text’. However since an exhaustive discussion on the play in its entirety is simply not possible, I shall focus on some key aspects related to the theme and content of the story and some attributes related to performance factors.

One of the hard hitting themes of Meya thuwakkuwak novay builds on the thesis -‘the power of the saffron robe’; a reality that no Sri Lankan can be unfamiliar with and still practically claim to be Sri Lankan.

The plot, at elementary level, has a young Bhikkhu who sneaks out one night intending to secretly disrobe, leave the order and enter a layman’s life, who encounters a man who is of an unsound mental state and over the course of a nightlong journey which metes out a chain of events decides to return to the folds of monkhood which will offer him better security from a world that seems maddening.

Saffron robe

The saffron robe holds an incomparable position of exaltedness in Sri Lanka. A factor that defines our national ethos since time immemorial. While the life of a clergyman demands that certain layman pleasures are given up, the clergyman’s position is accorded privileges and deference which a layman cannot claim.

The Bhikkhu who disrobes and finds that leaving the sacred saffron robe strips him of all privilege realises that life as a layman may not be as rosy as he may have envisioned.

What was clearly observable in Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay is that it overtly critiques the Buddhist establishment in Sri Lanka with regard to what may be thought of as ‘commonplace allegations’ which basically claim that some Bhikkhus pursue worldly pleasures.

The play openly views the police force as one that may willingly subject itself to the sacrosanct nature of the saffron robe and enforce the law between the clergy and laymen.

The manner in which the same person is treated when donning the robe and when wearing layman’s clothes shows that striking factor which works to the dismay and disadvantage of the Bhikkhu who planned to enter a layman’s life.

‘Do not underestimate the power of the saffron robe. Do not abuse the sacred robe of the Buddhist clergy’ seems to be an advocay Chamila has woven into the text of the play. Although it may be very easily decipherable to read the play in the context of an antiestablishment work, I feel there is a vein in the play which seeks to silkily move into the average Sri Lankan’s conscience that the sanctity of the saffron robe must be guarded against acts that would lower its esteem in the eyes of devotees, who would get disillusioned when they see a member of the venerable Sangha in an unbecoming manner.

Perhaps there lies the playwright’s statement of patriotism which speaks of a sense of nationalism beyond mundane politics and reaching to the deeper roots of our cultural being. Chamila, I feel, thus makes an appeal through the subtext of the play to both the religious establishments and laymen.

Disgruntled

While it is all too commonplace to expect disgruntled laity who gets disenchanted whenever a clergymen errs in conduct, one must also give consideration to the fact that a life in priesthood is not an easy task. Fighting temptation from worldly desires is easier said than done. And while perhaps society may be given to cynically look at those who leave priesthood as near degenerates, it should be borne in mind that during the time of the Buddha there had been a Bhikkhu who had left and re-entered the order repeatedly for seven times, and had finally become an Arahat.

It must be noted therefore that although the Bhikkhu who secretly disrobes to leave the order in Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay is more or less shown as somewhat an unwholesome character, the fact that he, although perhaps out of convenience, states at the end, is going to become a Bhikkhu and thereby effectively rejoin the order, shows there may be hope for him yet.

Perhaps the reality of the world he saw with all its myriads of vices and dangers will propel him to sincerely seek shelter in the order of the Sangha and truthfully seek to tread on a path of spiritual development.

The linearity of events tends to create our chronologies, if ‘time’ was to be measured by means other than watching the hands of a clock or the change of the direction of the sun. Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay brings this theorem of how time can be seen to manifest in relation to the motion of physical bodies, in very simple and practical depictions of interplay between characters and their actions. Thus Chamila brings a dimension of the ‘theory of relativity’ to the Sinhala stage.

The science that Chamila brings to the stage is not couched in grandiloquence but touches the sensibilities of an average person. If you aren’t in motion, then you are stationary. And if you believe objects are ‘moving towards’ you, the logical explanation is that at least one of the two is in motion, but which one exactly may be debatable.

The young Bhikkhu who wishes to exit the order is desperate to escape the landscape that he is caught in. The jubilance in his face as he believes the scooter he is mounted on is in motion shows how he intensely desires to believe he is going forward, towards a new horizon, leaving behind his past.

There is a great deal of symbolism involved in how Chamila has crafted the simple scenario of how a motorcycle stays put against an unchanging landscape, while a belief, or at least a desperate desire to be in forward motion by the riders is made a central investigation in the fabric of the play.

There is in that aspect of the story a serious ontological investigation about existence and reality. There is in that substance of the story an entreating facet of ‘absurd theatre’ which is however endearingly sculpted to meet a Sri Lankan viewer’s embrace in terms of plotline, story setting, and dialogic form. The absurdness in Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay however, cannot be called to draw its mettle from strands of Ionesco or Becket. Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay truly shows a Sri Lankan creative pulse for origination.

Absurd

This play is not directly classifiable as a realist play in terms of genre. But neither can it be called a work that fully befits the ‘theatre of the absurd’. The scenario depicted at the outset seems very realistic enough to anyone. The reply given by the vagrant-like man rummaging through the heap of wayside garbage, that he is looking for ‘a job’, ‘employment’, hints at an ingredient of the absurd, which is potent with symbolism while the revelation that the man is of unsound mental health sets the status quo to create a veneer of realism into the story’s premise.

When policemen are lulled to sleep every time a patriotic Sinhala song is played on the portable radio, there rises a vein of the absurd as opposed to the realist. When a woman with a child who arrives on the scene suspected to be the malefic female spirit from Sinhala folklore Mohini, an element of the fantastic comes into play. But when she reveals to be a streetwalking prostitute, the dimension of realistic plausibility sets in.

The symbolism in Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay is not overbearingly protuberant. It is tasteful. When the plain-clothed man who was before donned in the saffron robe tells a blissful drunkard that the latter’s drinking buddy ‘Dharme’, who apparently had been around a moment ago but seems to have vanished, is unlikely to be found, because the two topers had been discussing politics on the way from the bar, a chilling message wafts into the air.

When deciphering the structure with which the play has been woven in terms of how its different elements play out to deliver its ‘politics of theatre’, one must take to account that Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay is layered in its ‘meaning value’. The characters offer their respective doses of entertainment to the laughter seeking audiences through their interplay with each other while also possessing the capacity to be stand alone symbols.

The man of unsound mind seems to be the only person manifesting humanistic values which are sadly brushed aside due to the ‘inconvenience and impracticality’ to the person who desires his services to drive the motorcycle.

Policeman

The policemen while standing to be symbols of authority also represent their humaneness, which can of course have both positive and negative attributes. The prostitute who is clearly a destitute shows how she too is human although the general tendency would be to see her in the light of a ‘nonhuman’ – the image of Mohini taking a symbolic value here to parody ‘dehumanisation’ of women of the street.

The drunkard who merrily ambles homewards may seem a worthless boozer who squanders his money when he ought to spend it for his wife and child. Yet the same drunkard extends to the disrobed Bhikkhu, an ordinary looking young man, whom he had encountered in the dead of night on the open road, to spend the night at his house if the young man has no place to go.

It shows the heart warming humaneness that Sri Lankans like to consider as part of the ethos that defines our unique sense of ‘civic mindedness’; to be unselfishly giving and generous to even a stranger who may seem in need of a helping hand.

The spirit of hospitality that assures social security among ordinary people. The kind of generosity that says, ‘my home is yours, if ever you’re without shelter.’

The pile of garbage that never leaves the ‘escapees’ perhaps symbolises society today which has degenerated to rottenness. It is in that heap after all they find some of the most intriguing things. And all forms of employment must be ultimately sought out whether appealing or not, in society. The cannon, though silent, has a presence that creates a menace in the subconscious of the ordinary man who is given to wonder what its purpose is.

The only man who seems logical and laudable is rendered a voice that is unfit to emulate on account of being indicated a mental patient. The play is thus a dark comedy which does not however drive its audience to dismalness by projecting the darkness overbearingly. Sri Lankans don’t like it that way. Too bitter a truth cannot be hoped to be digested when forced down our throats. We have to be cajoled into taking our medicines. Chamila Priyanka is a theatre practitioner who understands the average Sri Lankan theatregoer’s pulse.

Commendable

I must wholeheartedly applaud the director for having a chosen a highly talented young pool of actors to take on the characters. Each of them delivered their role commendably to display an evenly balanced spectrum of acting talent on the boards that evening. The vision of the director can be optimally achieved only if the casting can be done to complement the roles in relation with the innate attributes of the players. Good actors are not easy to find. In this regard I feel the casting was done excellently.

Special mention must be made of Mayura Kanchana whose performance as the mentally unsound man was brilliant, as were Dilum Buddika as the Bhikkhu and Kanishka Fernando as the drunkard. The cast comprised Mayura Kanchana, Dilum Buddika, Kanishka Fernando, Pramodh Edirisinghe, Yashoda Rasanduni, and Anjana Premarathna.

The entire production team should be proud of what they achieved with Meya thuwakkuwak novay. The show was made possible I understand, due to the financial assistance from a collective of theatre supporters named ‘Naatti seettu’ led by Dr. Udan Fernando of the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) whose efforts must be appreciated in this regard.

During those undergrad days in the Colombo varsity’s Arts Faculty, there was at that time a pool of students who were involved with the mass media and performing arts in various ways. There were a host of Sinhala and English medium TV broadcasters – Buddhini Pathirana, Imani Perera, Nishani Pigera, Anouk Thilakaratne, the late Madhawa Ganegoda who initially hosted Derana TV’s ‘Waadapitiya’, Niranga Wijesuriya, Buddhiprabha Kulatunga, as well as yours truly! There were painters, dancers, vocalists, and musicians.

There were a number of thespians from various batches, and my batch alone had three playwrights cum directors who displayed their talents as undergraduates.

They were Indika Bandara Abeykoon, Prabath Kapurubandara and Chamila Priyanka. While it saddens me to see that not everyone who found an opportunity to bring out their talents in the arts and mass media back in those days, made efforts to continue engagement in those fields after leaving campus, it is heartening to know that from among the three drama directors mentioned, Chamila is committed to carve out a name as a theatre practitioner.

And I believe that what can be seen in Chamila Priyanka, through Meya Thuwakkuwak Novay, is the making of Sri Lankan theatre’s top satirist of the new generation.