My first glimpse was of GK (that’s what he’s been to most of us from the beginning) in a fury. I was the sub-warden at Ramanathan and the students were letting off steam over some issue, scrawling slogans on Hall notice boards and sticking up posters all over the place. Not a pretty sight.
I put up a notice in what I thought was good Jenningsian style: “Please stop defacing the boards and walls and come and discuss your grievances with us instead. You could remember in this connection that Poetry Peradeniya has called for contributions and the Art Society for entries for an exhibition.” GK confronted me sizzling, brandishing the notice, “Do you see what that joker has done?” GK was a co-editor of Poetry Peradeniya which he had founded. He thought the warden had put it up. I hastened to acknowledge my part and GK simmered down. He could see a joke.
The episode also revealed another side of GK’s character that I came to recognize: he needed to be in a ferment, at the centre of some encounter, all the time.
Refused to fit in
I don’t remember much about GK as a student except that he was capable of flashes of brilliance always. He had a problem fitting into the strait-jacket of eight three-hour papers divided into two examinations that we all had to face. Nobody actually liked it except perhaps the tidy-minded academic organizers who framed it. Some ingenious students worked out systems to beat it, but GK just refused to fit into it. He didn’t even appear for part of the Final and had to repeat it which also meant losing the chance of earning a class.
He did something very similar for the written part of the MA. I was now the Head and Chief Examiner and I found that GK had done the paper on “Practical Criticism” excellently but with the more formal paper spent almost all three hours on the passages set for comment and written just one other short answer to another question. In earlier and happier times the meeting of the entire Faculty Examination Board had the final say and the Head of the Department could plead special circumstances and adduce his opinion of the general brilliance of the student. This time I asked the External Examiner to give special consideration to the candidate. He replied,”Don’t worry Halpé. This fellow’s clearly the material you want!” He was an Oxford man.
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But in the end GK never made it to a formal higher degree for a characteristic reason. He hadn’t hit on a topic and a field. So I suggested that he document his intimate knowledge of the Street Drama in a thesis. He replied that he did not want to prostitute his engagement with Street Drama for personal gain.
Work on a production engaged him totally and he could barely tear himself away to do the teaching that brought him his rice and curry or paan-bunnis. His outstanding quality was recognized from the start.
Several groups of students at the University at Peradeniya took to amateur production – this was how the Dramsoc’s annual one-act play competition, which was entirely a student initiative, began. GK and some of his friends started this process when they performed Agamemnon on an improvised stage at one end of a quadrangle at Hilda Obeyesekere Hall. GK gave a powerful performance in the title role. I also remember the imaginative touch of using the balcony above the back of the quadrangle for the speech of the watchman at the beginning of the play looking out for the beacons that would convey the news of the Greek victory to Thebes.
GK was enthusiastically involved in all these productions as a student, gathering the experience and developing the expertise that he was to use so brilliantly in his own shows.
I can’t remember when exactly GK’s skills as a director were recognized but it had to be by the mid 1970s when he was invited to conduct theatre workshops for the new discipline of Fine Arts in the University of Peradeniya. That he was established by then is shown by the invitation to direct the British Council Drama Club in a French play to celebrate the Bicentennial of the French Republic, Bastille Day 1776. Since most of the audience would not know French an English translation of Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette, The Lark was selected.
Theatre and mobilizing the young
GK liked working with young people and enjoyed mobilizing a large number of them on stage. It was seen in this case too, where he reached beyond the middle-class school and school-leaver membership of the club to include some of the young working-class members of his street drama group.
GK had developed his own personal style when working in street drama, creating free-flowing, fluid short plays with a hard-hitting social and political content. He brought this style into the production of The Lark with several ballad-like sequences of singing and drumming performed by a group led by a balladeer played by GK himself. This group, presumably representing ordinary folk, sat on a raised platform in the centre of the auditorium. The scenes of Joan’s life were played on the conventional space in front of the audience. Thus the production had two foci. One was the episodes of Joan’s life dominated by the heroic figure of Joan, played in alternate performances with intense vibrancy by Andrea Vedanayagam and Haasinee Halpé. Other characters were rendered simply, sometimes as caricatures. The other focus was the group around the balladeer.
The alternation from the scenes of Joan’s life, built around Joan herself, to the group around the balladeer, quietly focused at times and throbbing with energy at other times, gave the production a special dynamism.Meantime there was a major increase of numbers in the Language Departments such as Sinhala, Tamil, English and French and in Fine Arts consequent on the Ministry of Education agreeing to include these subjects in the list for Special Admissions – a list of subjects whose continued existence in the curriculum was threatened by the system of admissions depending on ‘A’Level aggregates leading to the exclusion of candidates who had done quite well in these subjects but had not got the minimum aggregate for Arts and Humanities.
GK found a fertile soil in the increased numbers for these subjects, especially as many had engaged in theatrical activities at school or even done Drama as a subject. They included students from three media of instruction, Sinhala, Tamil and English. He devised for them a hard-hitting trilingual political satire built around a poem by Bertolt Brecht, a line of which he took as his title: Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown. Shaped by the wry astringency of Brecht’s political poetry the play made (no text has survived) a forceful comment on the contemporary Sri Lankan political culture. No shade of political opinion, no party, was spared satirical treatment for which GK elicited enormous zest from the young performers, who played with the exciting, enthusiastic intensity shown by GK himself in the central role of the turbanned, raban-playing balladeer. GK perceived the possibilities for a variety of modes of action, from soliloquies to choruses and from quick-fire exchanges as in talk shows to ballads and lyrics. He also showed the gift for seizing on the places and spaces available to him which was to prove invaluable when he toured a production to eight or nine different locations as in this case.
German woes
This production had an interesting history for we travelled up to Jaffna by train, going third class en famille, walking the palmyrah-fenced streets of Jaffna at night and bathing in the warm, ultra-shallow northern sea. We performed at the university and five schools. We slept on hard wooden beds of a school dormitory except for one night when our family stayed over at the Vice-Chancellor’s in deference to his invitation. Coming back south we performed at the University of Peradeniya and then recouped for what was to be the climax, an invited performance at the German Cultural Centre in celebration of the birthday of Bertolt Brecht.When we got there the place was full but in ferment. Someone had told the ambassador that we were subversives who were satirizing the President of the country.
The poor man was quite alarmed, for the German Cultural Centre was an arm of the German diplomatic representation in Sri Lanka. He disallowed the performance, saddening us, for people like George Keyt and Anne Ranasinghe had come to see it. The performers were feasted upstairs on assorted goodies while I was whisked off to a meeting with the ambassador at which he asked me, as the Head of the Department, to give him a declaration that we had no intention of insulting the Head of the State and thus the country. I had no difficulty about doing that! Our aim was not narrow partisanship but the awakening of political intelligence through comedy.
But the blood of the young performers was up. They couldn’t bear to let the day come to an end without doing the show somewhere. Two of the students offered their home in Colombo nearby which had plenty of space. They were driving off there when one of them noticed that they were being followed by police. The venture was abandoned.
Not the end of the story. For months afterwards, every now and then I was visited in my office by very charming CID officers who made polite enquiries about our drama activities and about GK.
Creative theatre
Viewed as creative theatre, both The Lark (re-named by GK The Lark can take a Lot of Beating) and Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown showed the confluence of the two channels in which GK’s dramatic energies were flowing. Classroom and workshop activity were enriched by the special understanding of the possibilities of drama and of the freedom and fluency gained by liberation from the enclosed volumes and spaces of the conventional stages and auditoria that were the norms in Sri Lankan theatres at the time, immensely extending our understanding of the essentials of dramatic experience.
The most striking examples of the confluence were the productions in Sinhala of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet. The former was originally developed along with the German professional director Fritz Bennewitz; for the latter he had as co-director Haig Karunaratne who was responsible for the considerable use of music and song in the production.
The Dream was done with the group that GK had brought together for Street Drama. It was drawn from young workers, some young people awaiting employment and a sprinkling of Sinhala-medium students. It was clear that GK had tapped into a great reservoir of social energy for these young people found in his productions an opening for the discovery and use of their creative potentialities. Many of them later became well-known actors on stage and screen, chief among them being H.A. Perera and Deepani while one, Parakrama Niriella, is a dramatist and director and the originator of a great current project, Janakaraliya – Theatre for the People, which borrows the idea of the travelling circus to take theatre to places and people who would otherwise have little or no chance of experiencing theatre, putting up a massive tent and portable platforms in remote areas: I spent a day with them in Polonnaruwa five years ago and recently Kanchuka Dharmasiri reported on a visit to them in Moneragala.
This project is thus a valuable descendant from GK’s Street Drama group. Bennewitz strongly combined the intellectual and the physical in his approach. As the production matured in GK’s hands later the show was dressed entirely in Sri Lankan costume underlining the sartorial distinction between the aristocracy in formal clothes – the Duke as a Nilamé, Hippolyta and the young people in various upper-class costume – and the “mechanicals” coming on first in rough working clothes, then the equivalent of Peter Quince in his Sunday best to come to court and then the performers in their theatrical attire. The set was extremely simple: just two of the armchairs ornately carved in imitation Dutch style freely available in this country for Theseus and Hippolyta, divans for the young bridal pairs and the space between, décor being provided by the ornamentation of the entrance with elaborate cutouts in Kandyan style and sesath and spears carried by the attendants standing behind the ducal party. The acting was in an exaggeratedly nâdagam style, quite seriously used by the performers but striking the theatre audience as burlesque.
Hamlet: Marriage of popular and formal
The most developed example of GK’s fruitful marriage of the popular and formal modes of theatre was his Hamlet in Sinhala which was done with students of Fine Arts and Languages at Peradeniya, staff and members of their families there, one or two Peradeniya workers and some recruits from the Street Drama group.
The style was highly eclectic, drawing on the Nâdagam, Kôlam and Nrti forms of the Sinhala theatre, on the director’s substantial experience of the political Street Drama which he developed for Sri Lanka, and on some British and continental models and readings. The eclecticism was not self-conscious but gave, rather, an effect of total spontaneity, the stylistic choices always seeming appropriate metaphors for the content at each given point. Both Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were done in the round, even conventional theatres being adapted so that the audience surrounded the actors – a common situation at street performances. This relationship between the actors and the audience developed too when I directed the British Council Drama Group in Twelfth Night some years earlier.
To take a “Western” element of GK’s Hamlet first: in the rendering of Hamlet’s scene with his mother, for example, Hamlet addresses her with an intensity and force, even a roughness of physical contact, that reminded us of Freudian readings of the relationship and were, in fact, offensive to more tradition-oriented members of our audiences quite as much as they were at variance with probable practice in Shakespeare’s theatre and in Shakespeare’s society. The effect was considerably reinforced when this Hamlet straddled his mother at the climax of his pleading. Yet the treatment was quite appropriate in this production’s reading of the personality of the prince as a forceful, quick-witted and indeed athletic young man, not notably aristocratic in behaviour and bearing and very free in his exchanges with his friends – a rendering well within the gamut of available interpretations.
Costume was on the whole a poor man’s version of vaguely Elizabethan attire and accoutrement. Hamlet was in the English theatre’s traditional black with the locket holding his father’s miniature prominently displayed on his chest. The fencing match was carefully choreographed by an instructor in swordsmanship.
At this point the Elizabethan and the Nrti modes overlapped, for the Nrti, which derived from nineteenth-century English melodrama as imitated by Parsee professionals of Bombay, went in for colourful archaism and gestural hyperbole. Correspondingly, the gesture and gait of the principals exhibited a degree of non-realistic stylization as typical of Nrti as of popular notions of Elizabethan acting which totally overlook Hamlet’s advice to the players.
The players tumbled and mimicked as in Kôlam folk theatre of southern Sri Lanka and two clowns used the loose-jointed, head-swinging, limb- flapping dance of the Kôlam Bahuboothaya (a clown-figure). The stylized entry of each major character in Nâdagam was used for the entrances of the Player King and the Player Queen.
The most pervasive Sri Lankan component was, however, the Lankan street theatre mode developed by GK himself for the dramatization of current issues and political commentary. The performance of the group at the World Food Conference in Sri Lanka, mocking the delegates to their faces became famous. Its spirit permeated the performances of the play and was concretized in the improvisatory effect of a great deal of movement and by-play. The entrance of Claudius and the Queen and their retinue in Sc.2, was very much in this vein, having a carefree informality that was most engaging, They were obviously straight from a carouse and rushed in with nothing of the courtly formality usually associated with this scene.
The King actually sat on the edge of the northern platform briefly before moving centre and then to the eastern part of the playing area with the Queen to sit on the “thrones” – roughly decorated chairs – placed for them. Yet he was able to make a very smooth transition at that point to commanding attention and then rendering his opening speech –“Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death/ The memory be green” (etc) – in suitably alamkarist Sinhala with due regard to its rhetoric. With another transition he unbent to Hamlet, moving right across to the south-west corner of the playing space where Hamlet had taken his malcontented stance.
The players made a very similar entrance through the audience on the western side of the playing area. Such moves occurred right through the performance causing continuous reorientation of the attention of the audience in relation to the action. Thus Sc.1 with the meeting of Bernardo and Francisco began behind the major part of the audience, which was on the southern side of the auditorium, and then moved through the audience on the east to arrive in the north-central area for the narration sequence. The Ghost appeared at three points of the compass in turn, north-east, north-west and south-west. The chorus which was introduced for the communication of Ophelia’s death, expanding the rendering of Gertrude’s poetic narration, started out in the garden on the west of the theatre near a massive tree and slowly moved to the western side of the acting area.
Dynamism at the core
This fluidity of action went along with a fine plastic sense of theatrical space in regard to planes and levels. Though this production was toured to a variety of auditoria, some effort was made to work on about three levels, more being used as available. This, combined with the playing in the round and the flow of the action in all directions across the central playing space to give a tremendous dynamism to the whole design.
The translation of the text itself was fresh and lively. Done by Gamini Haththotuwegama, Gamini Fonseka Edirisinghe and Lakshman Fernando, it was altered and redesigned as rehearsals progressed. It remains unpublished in print form and was made public only in the performed texts of 1991-2, though cyclostyled copies as made for the performers and crew survive. An English transliteration and literal translation may suggest something of the energy of the acting version:
Innavada? Næhenavada? Kumak kala yutuda? Prasnaya eyay.
Kroora daivayaka sædapahara meda vidina vidina dook peedana
Udâra sitakin darâ-gata-yutuda,
Nætnam dook-gæhæta sassurakata erehiva
Amôra kadu kinis komara rægena
Nashta kela-yutuda hæma?
Miya yanna, sætapenna, epamanai…
Literal translation:
To be or not to be? What should one do? That is the question.
’Midst the blows of a cruel fortune should the ills shot at one
Be endured with a noble mind?
Or, engulfed in a sea of troubles
Taking up swords, daggers, spears should one
Destroy them all?
To die, to sleep, that’s all…
These characteristics combined with three others to demonstrate the validity of the “rough theatre” of Peter Brook to Shakespeare performance. The three others were the rough and ready appearance of the costumes, the improvisatory effect that often came across and the frank acceptance of the youth of the performers – only GK himself, playing Claudius was over twenty-five. Though Polonius, for instance, was made up a bit and given a beard, no attempt was made to age his voice and movement, though he gave an effect of being an older man through a kind of addiction to mannerisms. Gertrude was played by two feisty young women and paired with two Hamlets for alternate performances.
Fluid, “rough”, dynamic this production liberated Shakespeare, (a feeling given, too, by another production when young actors performed Twelfth Night with the audience on three sides and quite close to them, which I directed.) All these productions gave one a sense of what it might have been like in Shakespeare’s day to have the audience close up and all around, at different levels and very visible, while audiences saw how truly plastic and “whole” performance in the round or on thrust stages could be. Both performers and audiences perceived that “rough” and “improvisatory” did not connote “unprepared” and “haphazard,” that in fact this theatre required well-prepared, alert and responsive actors and wide-awake adaptive audiences.
The creative energy and force shown by GK in these productions was also, we are told by former students like Kanchuka Dharmasiri whose tribute to “Sir” appeared recently, evident in the classroom. Fortunately, two excellent examples have appeared in print: his memorial tribute to Lakdasa Wikkramasinha delivered in 1976 at the memorial meeting for the poet after his untimely death and the Ludowyk Memorial lecture of 2004, delivered in 2005. The former was published in Navasilu 2, Journal of the English Association of Sri Lanka and the Sri Lanka Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 1979,ed. Ashley Halpé and reprinted in An Anthology of Contemporary Sri Lankan Poetry in English, ed by Rajiva Wijesinha, Colombo, 1988 and paid a warm and spirited tribute to the poet.
The latter was printed as Lecture 14 in the Faculty of Arts Guest Lecture series, University of Peradeniya and showed the combination of forceful concern for English and liberal thinking promised by the title . Kanchuka also bears witness in her article to GK’s generous helpfulness in discussions of her neophyte production of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano despite his well-known antagonism to Absurdism. This generosity was also shown to schools that approached him for guidance in Shakespeare production as for several years for Sanghamitta Girls’ School, Galle when his sister was teaching there, to Girls’ High School, Kandy and some schools in Colombo. This generous helpfulness is a sure mark of a truly creative personality.
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