Taking on a different role
View(s):- Yomal Senerath-Yapa meets Natasha Jayetileke here with the Emma Rice Theatre Company to train young actors
Natasha Jayetileke is back ‘home’, taking a break from the footlights, the cameras and all that whirlwind back in London as a British actress. Against the rustic Kolamba Kamatha in BMICH where we meet, she is relaxed and glowing.
She has come a long way since 2008, when The Sunday Times first featured her as a 26-year-old making her mark in the West End. She had by then played Nala in the Lion King, Draupadie in the Mahabharat and Jasmine in Aladdin.
Eighteen years later, Natasha is here for a special cause – to train young thespians along with fellow actresses and members of the Emma Rice Theatre Company, UK, sponsored by the British Council as part of the HSBC Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival.
Of late, Natasha has moved away from the West End on to theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe – where, over four centuries ago, the Bard himself staged his plays fresh off the vellum in front of Queen Elizabeth I and her successor James I…
Natasha, a second generation Sri Lankan-Brit has an English degree from Cambridge and had the full support of her parents for the quixotic career (for an Asian!) that she had chosen.
Being with the Emma Rice Theatre Company has allowed her to “diversify” (a favourite word). A big highlight for her is having been part of the play Romantics Anonymous, a rendition of a French movie (Les Emotifs Anonymes) that was set against a chocolate factory (meaning eating large supplies of Cadbury’s every night!) in Shakespeare’s Globe – all thatched and half-timbered outside and candlelit and intimate inside just like in the Tudor times!
But she also did Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Globe, with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), a moment that would have made her late grandfather Roderick Elmo Jayetileke very, very proud. He was a Latin and English master at S. Thomas’ Mount Lavinia, for whom the Bard was almost divine!
Working with RSC was extra special, says Natasha, because everyone, down to the production team, was at “the very top of their game”. It was also at the Globe that she played in The Buddha of Suburbia based on the novel by Hanif Kureishi.
Natasha has conquered the silver screen and television as well. Her movies include A Private War (where she was a Sri Lankan nurse) while she did a number of soap operas and drama mainly for BBC but also for ITV and Channel 4. “TV is a vastly different medium, and though theatre will always have my heart as my first love, I do enjoy the technicalities of working for television…,” she says. Despite “the challenge of having to adapt performance to a camera lens,” TV, she feels, has something more independent.
Asked for some blood-chilling moments on set she recalls being asked to handle a Chilean Rose Tarantula and make friends with it as part of an audition (“they later showed me the fangs were still there on the spider”) but the biggest thrill, she assures me, is the diversity of roles. She played the role of a mother (Mrs. Bhamra) in the famous ‘Bend it like Beckham: the Musical’ and just two years later Emma Rice made her play a teenager!
It’s always being able to “create characters from scratch” that excites Natasha. When she began in the West End, she mostly inherited other people’s roles (this was the case with Joseph and the Technicolour Dream Coat, Lion King, Mahabharat and Aladdin) but with the Emma Rice Company she has been able to do fresh, newly minted characters.
She does not perform as a dancer as much as did at the beginning of her career in the West End while other ‘developments’ since 2008 include a husband and two daughters…
Natasha is delighted that there are now many Sri Lankans in the West End and the drama scene in England (which was not the case when she began in 2004). She went to see Hiran Abeysekara as Hamlet and was “proud”- to see the great diversity of roles that Sri Lankans are taking on – “with the fact of being Sri Lankan – or looking and sounding Sri Lankan – no longer being a disadvantage”…
As for the stint she is doing in Colombo in connection with the Ceylon Literary Festival, where she trains both young budding thespians and their educators, she “couldn’t believe it” when the participation producer from Emma Rice had emailed her the suggestion. “I feel so lucky and so privileged – having been chosen to come and – to be in my homeland working with young people.”
Natasha hopes to “build up on this and see even more people – to bring what I learnt (in England) back here. We’d love to be back to share more.”
| Workshops and more The Emma Rice Theatre Company (formerly Wise Children) is created and led by multi-award winning director Emma Rice. Here with Natasha as part of the team to hold workshops for young thespians are Laura Keefe and Stephi Hockley who over the past few weeks have been using music, movements, storytelling, song writing and choreography to foster creativity. Both have done ‘lots of international tours’, and for Stephi, theatrical highlights include Mallory Towers and Bluebeard, while Laura starred in The Buddha of Suburbia for the Royal Shakespeare Company. They both chorus they are “having a lovely time” in Sri Lanka – “beautiful, everybody is so friendly and kind and the delicious food – we’ve been South to the beaches and went to the hill country for hikes…”
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