Fulfilling that early ‘exceptional promise’
While he waited anxiously in Colombo, the National Theatre, the UK’s publicly funded premier theatre, swung into action. David Hare, the playwright, and Rufus Norris, the theatre director, wrote letters of recommendation. The Arts Council, an apex body to promote the arts, sponsored his reapplication, arguing that he deserved the visa on account of being an individual of “exceptional promise”.
‘Magnetic’: Hiran as Hamlet at the National Theatre, London. Pic by Sam Taylor
In the years since, Hiran has more than lived up to that prediction. There has been a backdrop of magical realism and impishness in many of his performances such as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2016, which was filmed by the BBC, and as Peter Pan in Regent’s Park in London. His star turn in Life of Pi redeemed the weak novel and pole vaulted beyond the Ang Lee-directed Hollywood film portrayal of the lead character a decade earlier with a performance memorable for its vulnerability and portrayal of a teenager driven to temporary derangement.
Last year, Hiran was given the lead role at the very epic centre of English theatre, the National Theatre’s Hamlet. The implausible metaphor of being alone in a boat with a hungry Bengal tiger, as he had been as Pi, suddenly applied to his career as well. “It was overwhelming. I don’t think one can explain the pressure of (acting as Hamlet) after Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole and Ian McKellen,” he recalled, sitting in a cane chair on what serves as the stage in the small amphitheatre at his home in Kotte. “I felt like I was going a bit mad. At the beginning of the rehearsals, I felt that I couldn’t do it right. (It’s a play) about a man who is talking about everything he can’t do. His dad has said, ‘Avenge my death.’ And he can’t do it.”
A relationship with his then girlfriend broke up as Hiran initially struggled. He said friends termed his behaviour off-stage as melodramatic. He found himself on the verge of tears in the first couple of weeks of rehearsals. Hiran asked the play’s director to put him in touch with a couple of alumni of this school of hard knocks of this demanding role in the years before him. He spoke with actors Rory Kinnear and Papa Essiedu, who memorably played Hamlet in a Royal Shakespeare Company production set in an African state with a mostly black cast. Kinnear assured him that being driven a little crazy by the intensity of attention and expectation after having landed such a coveted role was normal. People had repeatedly asked Kinnear, who starred as Hamlet in the National Theatre production exactly a decade and a half before Hiran, if he was alright, the actor recalled.
Hamlet’s director, Robert Hastie, then gave him practical advice that played to Hiran’s strength, i.e. that he should use his charismatic ability to build an almost instant relationship with an audience. The burden of following in the footsteps of titans such as Olivier and McKellen was lightened. Physically and metaphorically, Hiran’s Hamlet is performed very close to the audience, often at the perimeter of the stage. In one of the memorable monologues of Hamlet’s self-loathing as he grapples with avenging his father’s murder that begins with, “Am I a coward? Who calls me villain?”, Hiran recalls that a member of the audience interrupted by shouting back that he did. Hiran improvised the succeeding lines; monologue became dialogue.
Bringing it home: Hiran at the screening at the Regal Theatre in Colombo last week organised by the British Council and the National Theatre. Pic by Nilan Maligaspe
It is one of the most affecting scenes in the Hamlet played by Hiran. He is fighting back tears one moment while directing comic sarcasm at himself the next.
The UK High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Andrew Patrick, was among those in the audience at the National on the South Bank in London last year. He describes Hiran’s as “a magnetic performance, and a sign of even greater things to come.” Patrick was also among those who attended the National Theatre screening in Colombo last weekend, organised by the British Council and NT. Patrick notes that many of the Shakespeare school competition winners were also at the screenings. “It’s things like that that also nurture Sri Lanka’s talent,” says Patrick.
Everyone I have spoken to who attended Hiran’s live performances at the National were uniformly complimentary, but it received mixed reviews in the press, variously for his tendency to speak too fast and play the role in a more comic vein than we are used to in a Shakespearean tragedy. Lounging in his Colombo home having taken his shirt off early in the interview, Hiran explained that the reviews were inevitably of his performance on press night at the start of the run in September: “On press night, I wanted to get it done without making mistakes. In hindsight, I should have breathed more.”
But he was also trying to convey the tensions and stress and speed of thought of a young man seeking to cope with a crisis. His director Hastie advised he not read the reviews, but Hiran, who turns 40 in November, went ahead and did so anyway. “It liberated me. It liberated me,” he exulted this week. “When I got some bad reviews, I thought, ‘They are taking me seriously.’” When he made an error on stage on occasion, he felt a sense of release: “I felt I can do anything.”
In turning the challenge posed by those reviews into an opportunity, he was drawing from life lessons learned from his mother after she divorced his father when he was a child. The lesson was to laugh in the face of hard times. As he told The Observer newspaper in an interview in September, his mother had the habit of paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes. “If she didn’t want to answer a question, she would simply say: “My mind is not an attic, son. I throw away the things I don’t need.”
Hiran’s production of Hamlet closed in London in late November and is transferring to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in April. Hiran is on holiday in Sri Lanka for another month or so but ever hyperkinetic, he is working on a film script with an Indian classmate and close friend from his days as a student at RADA. It is a story set in Sri Lanka in the 19th century.
He is also planning a performance for late February in the small amphitheatre at his home with a couple of friends from London. It is the first of a few fundraising efforts to start a creative residency near his home in Kotte. Hiran has lived for many years in what he quips is a “bijou dorm”, a large communal home for 10 to 12 in Stepford owned by Willi Richards, the English director who cast Hiran as Romeo in a tri-lingual Romeo and Juliet in 2007 and then was a leading force in getting him into RADA. He wants the residency to have a massive kitchen, like that in the communal home he lives in in London, which he believes will serve as a creative hub in the coworking space of an artistic kind.
It will not be far from his home in Kotte, and the streets where he and his school friends chanted lines such as “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble” from Macbeth, which he acted in as a teenager. It is another sign that in preparing the way for more talent from Sri Lanka to find an international audience, a perpetual Peter Pan is growing up.
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