DRAMA

Sihina Velenda : Unravelling the underbelly of darkness

by Dilshan Boange

Playwright and director Thilak Pinnapola brought to life his Sinhala stage play 'Sihina Velenda' on the boards of the Punchi Theatre last month. The title can be translated to English as The Merchant of Dreams, or The Vendor of Dreams. The title struck me as something very romantic and I ventured to wonder if it was to be a story bound to a romantic surrealist theme. Love can often seem dreamy and in fact does seem so at its dawn in the lovelorn. But love can also lead to the darkness of nightmares.

Sihina Velenda is about unravelling the underbelly of darkness where love, lust and deception are made to engulf a set of householders living under one roof. And the price is paid most dearly by a young girl who in all genuine naivety desires only her childhood 'true love' to be her life's companion.

The cast consist of Priyantha Jayasinghe, Chandana Irugalbandara, Iresha Namali, Sankara Wijeratne, Wasantha Rupasinghe and Chathura Dasanayake.

The play's story moves between the plane of the dead and the living. The 'present' if we are to think of it as such within the frame of the text as it unfolds with the Maaraya (Death) being a narrator who addresses the audience, is very much the sphere of the 'otherworldly' and the 'past' is the life of 'Mandira' and her daughter 'Piyumi' who shared a lover named 'Vishwa', who was brought to their estate bungalow as an orphan and later given employment as an overseer of sorts.

The play is ripe with morbidity and given the nature of certain elements as pregnancies out of wedlock, a forced abortion and ghoulish narrators it is not at all a stage play suitable for children. To this end I will even mention an observation of a viewer reaction where at a certain point in the play, as the character of 'Maaraya' stomped around and bellowed his intimidation, I heard a small boy seated in the row in front of me whimper to his mother Amme mata bayai (Mother I feel scared).

One of the problems I saw is placing Piyumi's age within the text of the play. She is made to be thought of as nubile for sure, but as to whether she has actually reached adulthood is in question, since her schooling at the convent doesn't seem to be over at the time the issue of a 'love and lust' triangle begins.

Mandira who is revealed to be pregnant is adamant to get her daughter married at the point she declares her love for Vishwa and reveals she is carrying his child. It is a tale of tragedy where the extents of pursuing desire leads to results that haunt humanity's sense of shared morality.

Sihina Velenda deals the striking question as to what we feel about death? As much as we mourn the loss of a loved one, will we rejoice at the demise of those we detest? However much love may seem an illusion, however much it may seem a dream that we may like to make last continually, the inevitability of death is the only lasting assurance.

But from the very opening scene of the ghosts of Mandira and Piyumi who in the afterlife don't really know each other, it is stated clearly that the reality of death is seldom fully accepted, even by the dead themselves.