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Arts Notebook by Aravinda

The name of Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra, the father of modern Sinhala drama, has begun to appear in the public prints again as a result of the conferring of the richly-deserved Ramon Magsaysay award on Pandit W. D. Amaradeva. This is both because Amaradeva provided the music for several of Sarachchandra's later plays and was indeed 'discovered' by him and the late D. B. Dhanapala and also because Sarachchandra was the last Sri Lankan to receive the Magsaysay award in 1983.

However if Sarachchandra's name is most memorably linked with his great play 'Maname', another name which this link evokes is that of the late Charles Silva Gunasinghe Gurunnanse of Balapitiya on whose 'nadagam' version of 'Maname' Sarachchandra based his play. It is therefore entirely appropriate that a book of reminiscences and anecdotes about Gunasinghe Gurunnanse should now be available for he more than anybody else kept the old tradition alive so that it could in time give forth a modern Sinhala theatre.

Edited by Tilakaratne Kuruvita Bandara and Hemapala Ranasinghe this book is clearly a labour of love. The compilers have approached an array of persons who had been associated with both 'Maname' and the late Gurunnanse and brought out in the form of a collection of essays a book which is both a tribute to the man as well as a tender evocation of the cultural stirrings of the 1950s which brought us not merely 'Maname' in the theatre but 'Viragaya' in literature, 'Rekhava' in the cinema and 'Karadiya' in the ballet.

Sarachchandra's voyage of discovery on a Rockefeller fellowship is now part of the contemporary legend. He went to India, China and Japan to study dram but had to return to Sri Lanka to find inspiration for his path-breaking play 'Maname'. That inspiration he found in Gunasinghe Gurunnanse of Ampe, Balapitiya, a folk artist already quite advanced in age when Sarachchandra introduced him to the groves of academe at Peradeniya and over the air waves of the then Radio Ceylon.

An actor, singer and exponent of the 'maddala' and the 'Demala beraya' Gunasinghe Gurunnanse appeared destined to preserve the old oral tradition of the 'nadagamas' until the sophisticated scholar Sarachchandra came along with his critical paraphernalia to disinter the old tradition and bring it to the proscenium stage.

In the Gurunnanse in turn Sarachchandra found a one-man repository of song, dance and music, a grand old man of the theatre, a trouper of the old school cast in the mould of those old music hall figures so lovingly celebrated by J. B. Priestly in his novels.

There are several sketches here which evoke the master at work. Most of the undergraduates who staged 'Maname' had never seen a 'nadagama' but Gunasinghe Gurunnanse was able to work the magic so that the old folk play of the southern village would come alive on the modern well-lit stage of the King George's Hall or the Lionel Wendt theatre.

Sometimes dissatisfied with a player's performance the Gurunnanse himself would in Sarachchandra's own words demonstrate rather strenuous dance steps at rehearsals, although it was not good for him and his pupils were anxious. AT the first performance of Maname at the Lionel Wendt theatre, a reviewer remarked how Gunasinghe Gurunnanse seated with his drum occasionally throwing some betel and arecanut into his mouth from a packet placed by his side and following with his eyes and head the movements of the players, nodding in approval when they did well, and reflecting on his face every mood of the play, was as much a contribution to the performance as the players themselves.

The book also strikes an elegiac note for lost friends. For not only is Gunasinghe Gurunnanse and Sarachchandra dead but so are most of the central figures of 'Maname'.

The first to go was Ben Sirimanne, the charming Prince Maname, snatched away in middle age. Edmund Wijesinghe, the fierce Veddah king who kills him in a duel for the Princess' hand, followed soon after. Then it was the turn of the Princess herself, Trelicia Gunawardena who followed her husband, A.J., not even a year after his death. Now only her successor is left, Hamamali Gunasinghe, and the Pothe Gura Shyamon Jayasinghe exiled in Australia.

Finally the book can be seen as a homage to a lost age as well. The 'nadagam' itself was a form of folk theatre of Indian origin so that the extended essay by Siri Gunasinghe in this volume seeking to demolish the theory of a 'pure' or unadulterated Sinhala culture has a strangely 1960s ring and is an attack on a straw man. However as Gunasinghe's bete noire Gunadasa Amarasekera points out after the decline of high culture following the Kotte period, indigenous forms of art found shelter and sustenance only in the folk tradition.

It is to this tradition of the folk as embodied by one of its last remnants that Sarachchandra went to draw sustenance for his plays. But after Sarachchandra's death there has been no significant stylised play which has combined refined poetry with stylised dance movements. It is a moot point whether such a play will ever emerge again from our society now irrevocably caught up in the coils of consumerism and popular culture.

The Sinhala theatre today is dominated by the absurd and the post-modernist and anyway has to live in the shadow of a television culture which has enthroned a shameless vulgarisation masquerading as modernisation 'Maname' was essentially a 1950s type of experimentation, the seminal product of an age of cultural stirring in the wake of political independence.

We have come much further down that road today and seem to be lost without either map or compass. That is why this book itself appears to be a final valedictory salute, an ineffably sad benediction, to those two great masters who practised 'Maname' on the Sanghamitta Hill in the long dead 1950s.

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