Let Shakespeare enrich our cultural encounters

by Gamini HATTOTUWEGAMA

A biographical mischief maker once claimed that I grew up with Shakespeare. As a schoolboy I did roll through Shylock, Mark Antony, Hotspur, Hamlet in long and short spells. As an undergrad majoring in English I took the Shakespeare pummelling that we students were heir to, returning it in good part and good heart years later as a University Lecturer in English and Fine arts. My undergrad days rolled me back into acting in the most serious and dignified theatre the country then produced, either in Sinhala or English, but it was when I became the 1st ever English Honours student to produce a Sinhala play that I tumbled into some kind of history not through Shakespeare but Chekov.

Kolam performance

Incidentally, Chekov competes with Shakespeare as the most produced foreign dramatist in Sri Lanka. I hope Mr. Obinamuni Gamini De Silva, President Shakespeare Centre Sri Lanka, these competitions will induce both teachers and schoolchildren to study our own theatre history, let alone the Shakespeare texts, which is an obvious compulsion. Our country has been tuned to Shakespeare from the 19th century and many schools have been farming the big guy! My own school is Richmond College, Galle, and some exciting Shakespeare resonances carry me back there. Sri Lanka’s 1st and greatest Shakespeare scholar E.F.C. Ludowyke, came from Richmond, and then at Cambridge University he knocked the pants off all the competing British, American, Canadian, Australian, West Indian and Asian scholars to win the coveted Oldham prize for Shakespeare scholarship.

What is even more exciting about this Shakespeare expert is that he came back to this country of his birth to become not only our first Sri Lankan Professor of English but our first most inventive and subversive of English play” producers. Going only once or twice to Shakespeare, he pushes Sudhrake’s Sanskrit play Cart into King George’s Hall, also calls on the, 2000-year-old Chinese Lady Precious Stream, and introduces Germany’s great Brecht as early as 1949 via “The Good Woman of Setzuan” (our good, good woman being that Shakespeare teacher director Jeane Pinto) and then produces a Sinhala Gogal “Kapuwa Kapothi” with the supreme sun in our theatre horizon Ediriweera Sarachchandra as adapter-transcreator of the Russian play.

Ludowyke’s readings of Shakespeare in class were a treat. He never resorted to or encouraged this thing called elocution and would have pooh, poohed the colonial allegiance to the Trinity College of Speech and Drama and laughed his guts out at what’s happening today. Yes! Undoubtedly! The long-suffering teachers and students of Drama and English should cherish this choice tale going to relate about a local English T.V. presenter. One day some teacher-friends of mine and I distinctly heard this young woman uttering that lovely Sinhala term for urine “choo” in her Englishy talk when she only meant Two! Ah, the tchoo-chewing vulgarities of our imitative neo-colonial vocal culture! This is certainly not the kind of bilingual transaction that we’d savour. Judging over a recent school’s Sinhala Drama Competition Haig Karunaratna and I were witness to a most lovable Bottom mischievizing a very lively Midsummer Night’s Dream. You must go for these comps, try taking part.

Gamini Hattotuwegama

We also saw a wonderful Sinhala “Oedipus Rex” there. You have to open yourselves to these transactions. I wonder whether you’ve ever heard of the very highly rated “radical” (as the critics claimed) “uniquely resourceful” Peradeniya University “Hamlet” transcreation. The only reliable scholarly account of Shakespeare productions in Sri Lanka (written by Prof. Ashley Halpe) historizes this transcreation of Shakespeare’s most demanding play. Oh, I know the doers of Shakespeare have sometimes made us sit up when they present their own not-so-little Shakespeares. School boys and girls have with lusty convictions and ease continued to shake up society’s given antitheses between male and female masculine and feminine. It’s possible with young men and women sporting the same age.

On a visit to Germany I found myself often mistaking boys for girls and girls for boys in their unisex dress. Earlier we saw how Newstead brought such vigour and beauty to their transformations as they truly tamed Shakespeare’s shrew. But what of boys playing mature women? Only the other day we were made to witness a young fellow taking us through a difficult Cleopatra with courageous skill, - so what? We might say. Shakespeare study and Shakespeare acting prise open questions regarding power and gender and runaway notions we’ve got from the west about sexism. It’s time we liberate ourselves by going to our own theatre traditions to consider these problems.

I re-quote from my Ludowyke Memorial talk: My select model is the Kolam and the well known “Jasaya-Lenchina” I hope to god you have heard of these dramatics! Kolam is a masked dance drama which developed to use song and spoken idiom confined to a few places in the southern coastal areas a folk theatre performed sparodically now. The central situation is the “eternal triangle”. Jasaya, the washerman has brought a mistress to live with him. Lenchina his wife an amorous woman married against her will laments her fate and complains to the Mudali the village functionary, an intermediary official in the colonial order. The case is tried after a whole little farcical drama is played out where the official a man of higher caste tries to flirt with Lenchina and Jasaya plays the hell out of him behind his back. Of course, it’s very sexist because the jokes are sexist, the woman is the object. Yet we have to tread carefully over this particular text because Jasaya is a half cripple apart from being of lower caste. He has a lot of fun at the expense of the dignitary. The power-play is ambiguous and exciting because the comedy after all empowers a physically and socially handicapped man. The way he gyrates on one leg and weaves in and out of the Mudali’s figure and releases his jokes demonstrates how the dance form itself is utilized as a vehicle of power.

At best the performer becomes one of the three best performers I have seen anywhere. The fact that the Mudali is also an intermediary in the local government order of the same colonial order empowers Jasaya’s comedy dance. As for the sexism which is blatant and which stereotypes the woman even as an object inviting sex there is another text here. After all the actors are all men and the audience all know it and enjoy that very fact that man is mimicking the woman and is not a real woman.

The descriptive satire I think is also directed at a man playing a woman and the “fun” is an ambiguous physical purgation of sexist impulses. Hence the disruption of sexual differences that Catherine Belsey talks of in the Shakespeare comedies in an essay in Alternative Shakespeare (New Accents Gen-Editor Terence Hawkes, edited by John Drakakis), may be different: (Shakespearean comedy can be read as disrupting sexual difference, calling to question that set of relations between terms which proposes as inevitable antithesis between masculine and feminine, man and woman.) Anyway we are negotiating unfair ground comparing folk here with classical there, set in vastly different social contexts. There are those alienating devices in the Kolam, the masks and narrative voice. Shakespeare is relatively “unredeemed”. I thank the Kolam for these simple insights. It’s very liberating. Yet, I think the very act of going to our own creative works and going through them to the western “models” can be a decolonizing venture.

William Shakespeare

Certainly, if we grew up with Shakespeare, why not have alternative Shakepeares growing up with us? When I went back to Richmond after graduation I took Shakespeare to the spoof with a production called “Shakespeare in Sarong” where in a pretty and delicate Juliet graced the stage as kitchen maid played by a boy of course! And good old Shakespeare came as Narrator, clad in long cloth and coat, sporting a ‘konde’ and twirling an umbrella. I hope that Shakespeare clubbers would have enough comic tolerance and grace to take all this in. Surely, they are not BBC oriented decadent colonials supportive only of our terrorists, creeping out of a land that not only begot Will Shakespeare, but Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Emily Bronte! Let us not forget that when Shakespeare went on film it was not the English speaking countries that gave the world the best Shakespeares- the Soviet Union gave us Kuzenstev’s cracker-jack “Hamlet” of “Hamlets”, and Japan’s Kurosawa wrought further gold with “The Throne of Blood” that Macbeth had stained so terribly.

We should not miss participating in our own liberated cultural encounters whatever language they take place in, which Shakespeare could enrich. Do not go by the known hidebound elitist Colombo centred monopolies preening and somnambulating here or coming over from abroad to swallow us up in our own homes. Think of the genuinely alternative-even disruptive, subversive Shakespeares we could do, and Juliet’s words: “A rose by another name will smell as sweet”. In a famous Shakespeare play-cum-film made memorable by the great English actor-director Lawrence Olivier, a cruelly cruel terrorist king “Richard III” on losing his last battle, shouts: A horse! My kingdom for a horse! Just think, there were no N.G.O.s or hypocrital western corporates rushing in with horses to rescue the terrorist! Of course you’d remember that much greater power-crazy men become terrorists - a Scot named Macbeth, who once did save his country from treachery and possible invasion, but goes on to kill and kill, and kill for power, and then massacres another hero Macduff’s whole family? Macduf is in England with Scotland’s crown Prince Malcolm when the news comes. So the Prince tells Macduff: Dispute it as a man. Macduff’s reply rings and resonates to this day: But first I must feel it as a man.

(Text of the talk delivered by Dr. Gamini Haththotuwegama recently at Shakespearean Challenge 2009 Award Ceremony and Shakespeare Commemoration hosted by the Shakespeare Centre Sri Lanka, held at National Museum Auditorium)