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| Sunday, 7 December 2003 |
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Ernest Macintyre brings a double theatre bill of satire to Colombo audiences. Below is a note by him on the plays, what they are about and why he chose these particular plays. I was attracted to the prospect of participating in the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Lionel Wendt and with Sydney Kolam Maduwa, which had other members associated with the Wendt, agreeing, I began to think of a suitable play. For the occasion, one with the Lionel Wendt featuring in its plot seemed a great idea. But the doors of a theatre are for the world to blow in, and 2003 was the year of Iraq. So, the plot of the play would be flavoured by the Lionel Wendt event and its substance would be from the world outside. Despite the close relationship between theatre and the world what could bring the Lionel Wendt and Iraq 2003 into the same plot? There then flashed into the imagination, two very separate people, to provide the solution. Nikolai Gogol and Jayantha Dhanapala. Gogol One a famous Russian playwright and the other a Sri Lankan friend from university days who has been adi tinguished international civil servant and an ambassador for Sri Lanka apart from being an actor of considerable talent who played Horatio at the Wendt when I directed Hamlet in 1973. Nikolai Gogol, because his play "The Government Inspector" (1836) is about a famous impostor inspector named Khlestakov who will certainly outlive both Richard Butler and Hans Blix, currently well-known recent UN Inspectors of Iraq. Khlestakov, a minor Russian official passing through a small town is mistaken by its mayor and his gang of corrupt councillors for a government inspector being sent incognito from St. Petersburg to inspect the town's state of affairs. When Khlestakov realises that he has been mistaken for a high personage, he plays the part to the hilt. He is not a simple impostor but a virtuoso fantasist who deludes himself as enthusiastically as he does his corrupt hosts, in the process discovering the common humanity of his role. Bhoomisthan So, a Lionel Wendt actor would be stuck in a country called Bhoomisthan, unable to return home for the 50th anniversary performance of his beloved theatre. He is not only a well known Sri Lankan actor but a government servant as well (not uncommon in Sri Lanka's part time theatre; Sydney de Zoysa, Raju Coomaraswamy, Henry Jayasena, Karen Breckenridge, Jayantha Dhanapala, Dhamma Jagoda, Ben Sirimanne, Percy Colin Thome, Gunasena Gallapathy, Wijeratne Warakagoda and so on, briefly and at random.) It is in his capacity as a government servant that he and his assistant are stuck in Bhoomisthan, transacting some shady deal whilst on an official mission. He is mistaken for a UN Inspector being sent incognito to inspect conditions in Bhoomisthan, weapons of mass destruction being his ultimate target. When a well-known Sri Lankan comic actor, discovers he is mistaken for a high (incognito) UN Inspector, his talent and training for comic acting overwhelm all other instincts in him; he like Khlestakov becomes the part he is pretending to be! And like Khlestakov he discovers his common humanity in the terrible fate of Bhoomisthan. Like the other thief on the cross, Jayakumar Gunapalan, the allegedly bent civil servant, has the capacity to recognize moments of truth, aided by his knowledge of world drama. Civil servant As for my Sri Lankan international civil servant friend, to mistake a Sri Lankan stuck in Bhoomisthan for a high up UN Inspector, inspecting a brown-skinned population such as the Bhoomis, there would have to be such a brown skinned high up official in the disarmament division of the UN to enable the Incognito act! And there was! The reason for two plays in our participation at the Lionel Wendt festival has something to do with the feeling we had, that to come all the way, with all the effort involved, and have just one or two nights of performance would not be in proportion. So we thought of eight shows in all. But with a seating capacity of 621 seats at the Wendt this would mean attracting about 5000 theatregoers for a play in English. After consultations in Colombo I gathered that this would be too big a number to expect for a play in English. So we calculated that we could halve the target number to about 2500 if we had two plays on offer. It would have been too much, though, to create another play and cast and rehearse it separately. Small cast So I fell back on a play with a small cast (so that actors from the UN Inspector could play in it) that had proven itself in performance in Australia, from 2000, and this was He Still Comes From Jaffna. He Still Comes From Jaffna is also set in warlike times, and is also played as comedy, but domestically, in Sri Lanka. It was triggered by an editorial I chanced to notice in the Sri Lankan daily newspaper, The Island of Sunday 24 March 1991. My play "He Still Comes From Jaffna" was written in 1999, about nine years after the editorial. There is virtue in throwing something into a drawer for later reading. The UN Inspector is a Sri Lankan - will go on the boards of the Lionel Wendt theatre on 9th, 10th, 11th Dec. at 7.30 pm and on the 12th 3 pm (matinee) and He still comes from Jaffna on the 12th, 13th 14th and a special matinee on the 10th (3 pm). A special anniversary performances for the Wendt theatre on the 9th is dedicated to Winston Serasinghe whose birth anniversary is on the 9th, and the show on the 12th, is dedicated to KarenBreckenridge. The plays are co-sponsored by The Sunday Observer. |
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