A reflection of life and mixed bag from Gunasenas
Refreshing TV fare comes our way every Saturday
evening with the new series titled 'Bhavana' (Meditation) created
by talented artiste Bertram Nihal. They are not stories on meditation but
they do make one think of life - how one has to face different situations
in daily life. To that extent we do have to meditate on such happenings,
that give an insight to life.
The single episode tele-plays are based on well known foreign short
stories. Bertram has got some of our best writers to adapt them to the
local scene. They have done such a fine job that watching the tele-plays,
it's difficult to feel they are not our own. Full marks to the writers
- Tissa Abeysekera, Somaratne Balasuriya, Simon Nawagattegama, K. B. Herath,
Edwin Peiris and Bertram himself. They also prove the point that most happenings
are universal.
A pioneer in the field of television production, Bertram came into the
limelight with the single episode, Christmas teledrama, 'Samaye Tharuwa'
(1982). 'Subha Prarthana' was his first full length teledrama. Thereafter
he has given us some good teledramas during the past few years. 'Dadabima',
'Kadawara', 'Isurugira' and 'Gamperaliya' among them.
New titles by Gunasenas
Pioneer in book publish-ing in Sri Lanka,
M. D. Gunasenas, counting over 85 years in the business since the time
the late M. D. Gunasena started the New Victor Press (it was named M. D.
Gunasena's in 1925) marked the World Book Day with the release of 15 titles.
It was a mixed bag covering a number of areas and was the work of experienced
writers. The Sinhala version of the film script of the well-known Japanese
film 'Rashomon' by Professor Ariya Rajakaruna (he is well versed
in the language) was among them. Another translation by the mass communications
expert, Professor Sunanada Mahendra -'Nisshabda Nasrudin' - was also released.
Film director and writer Amarnath Jayatilleka brought out his latest
creation 'Chitrapata Shilpaya Saha Sinhala Cinemawa'. The rest included
a hundred humorous tales by Piyasena Amarakirti's ('Sina Gangula'),
a collection of five short stories by P. A. Matupala ('Ballange Kathawak'),
a work on the Dhamma ('Daham Denum Sangrahaya') by Rahala Khemanada
Thera and one on the 'Gambhara Deviyo' by Asoka Malimage.
'Asammataye Kathawak', an award winning story by a new writer
Enoka Vasanthi Samaraweera, two books on business management by A. M. Kularatne,
a cookery book by Jeevani Hasantha Wickrematunga and the second in a series
on draughts by Thushara Dayanath Wickremasinghe were the other Sinhala
titles released. There were also three English titles by R. B. Atapattu
- 'Nursery Rhymes II & III' and 'Reading, Writing and Colouring'.
Into the other world of that never ending love
story
Excerpts of a talk by Dr. Ashley Halpe at the launch of
Gwen Herat's book 'The Spirit of Romeo and Juliet'.
It's all about that "riot in the heart",
Tom Stoppard's exquisite phrase for the thrill of love in his now-so-famous
film, Shakespeare in Love. Stoppard does the reverse of what our
author of tonight has done. Gwen Herat ranges forward, primarily, through
the centuries, in a wonderfully imaginative adventure in the realms of
metempsychosis leading up to the electric splendour of the Nureyev incarnation.
Stoppard does the opposite, as it were. He tracks back from Romeo and
Juliet, from the play, to the mind and heart that conceived it. One gathers
from the reports (for we have yet to see the film) that he invents circumstances
as romantic and intense as those Shakespeare creates in his play to body
forth a fictive "habitation and a name" for the genesis not only
of Romeo and Juliet and their tragic drama but also for the florescence
and bursting forth of Shakespeare's genesis itself.
But Sir Tom Stoppard's film is only the latest testimony that the timeless
tale first created for us by Shakespeare's dramatic romance (effectively,
so, for earlier versions are remembered only by academics) has an extraordinary
power of reincarnation in art. For those of us who came to adolescence
in the forties or early fifties the first encounter was perhaps the ethereal
interpretation by Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in the black and white
film made in 1936.
In the fifties we were shaken into a new consciousness of the story's
power by Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, with its haunting
lyrics like "Maria", particularly when that truly great film
version reached this part of the world a few years later. Then came Franco
Zeffirelli's marvellous 1967 film with the two enchanting performances
by the very young players of the title roles (not many of us, probably,
had the privilege of seeing Zeffirelli's stage version a few years earlier).
Last year we had the modern-day adaptation starring Leonardo di Caprio
and now we await the chance to see Shakespeare in Love.
In fact our own theatre and cinema have not been wanting in creative
response to this great Shakespearean invention. There was a Romeo-Juliet
Nadagama as early as 1874 and a famous production in the Nurti style by
C. Don Bastian in 1884. G D L Perera made the film Romeo Juliet Katavak
30 years ago and some ten years later Aadara Katavak gave a
very moving rendering of the story in terms of the Sinhala and Tamil exclusivity
in regard to marriage.
What is the secret of this tale's special immortality? Without a doubt,
Shakespeare's treatment of it, for tales of hopeless love and doomed romance
are legion in the literature and drama of sentiment and, indeed, in the
newspapers we read each morning. Only two weeks ago another young couple
jumped to their deaths at World's End, and Gwen Herat herself alludes to
the legends of Princess Nerina and Rassine, of Hammer and Kinzara of the
island of Nauru, and to the fate of Margaret Clopton in Shakespeare's own
neighbourhood.
When one looks back at the play it comes as a bit of a surprise that
fully a quarter of the play has already passed before that first encounter
of Romeo and Juliet at the ball. We realize that Shakespeare's delaying
tactic had actually played on our sense of expectation, generating a suspense
laden desire for the famous romance to begin.
And what a beginning it is! The Zeffirelli film captured it wonderfully.
In the printed text, forty lines, which would represent several minutes
in performance, elapse between Romeo's arrival in the ballroom and the
first speech in which he shows that he has seen Juliet. Shakespeare was
a man of the theatre par excellence, and he gave his actor time to express
his alienation from the gaiety of the proceedings around him and then his
visual focusing of the still unknown Juliet.
And then we hear him say to a servant:
Note, ''enrich.'' He has been struck by her, it has begun.
Confirmation follows quickly:
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night.
As a rich jewel in an Ethiopian's ear...
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
By setting Romeo's speech in rhyme Shakespeare signals that something
special is happening, and the imagery richly enhances our sense that something
high and precious is taking place. But with fine theatrical sense Shakespeare
holds us in suspense again, while Tybalt frets and fumes, before Romeo
and Juliet actually meet.
The film emphasized this effect by adding a double frame: one is the
dance, which is the context in which the whole episode is situated, and
the other the singing of a lyric by a boy soprano.
Then Romeo reaches her, and as they share their first precious timeless
moment, the play of expression on their faces, the nuancing of inflections
in their voices, the messages from gesture and posture, must give the depth
and warmth to the intricate rhetoric of their speech.
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this;
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
and Juliet continues
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much....
It would take too long, on an occasion like this, to talk of the exquisite
flow of subtext through these and the succeeding lines.
It is a rosary of scenes identifying and exemplifying the rare quality
of their love-experience, whether at Juliet's balcony, or as they wake
after their first night together, or in the tomb of the Capulets. The plot
and action support this expression without seeming to control it.
The rare quality of this mutuality and intensity is, we realize as the
play comes to an end, what really matters. That is what Shakespeare was
really putting before us, and not the misfortunes of circumstances or the
patterns of early death.
And this, surely, is why Shakespeare ends the tale with their deaths;
he rounds off this very special experience, and preserves it from suffering
the minutiae of commonplace existence and the fading or even transformation
of rapture with the passing of time. At this point of his career and life
Shakespeare was perhaps too young or too fraught to envision the reincarnation
of love in middle age that he expresses so movingly in the final scene
of A Winter's Tale.
By rounding it off, Shakespeare commands time to stand still. He has
put before us a standard of ideal relationship by which to measure our
mundane compromises with our finest feelings and with each other.
The youthful Gwen Herat was not able to accept it this way. "Did
Romeo and Juliet really die?" she asked, and even now she answers
"I am convinced not, for so rich and sacrificial was their love."
Even since she studied this great tragedy as a schoolgirl, she says, she
has felt that Shakespeare meant to go back to this story somehow, to create
a sequel. This idea took root in her sensibility and gained obsessive force,
though remaining latent and unexpressed.
We know that Gwen Herat has been a woman of many concerns from her writings
on the environment, on gardening, on cricket, on Shakespeare himself and
from her championship of many worthy causes. But at the core there always
has been, we discover, a volcanic lava of fervid imagination, the mystic
medium in which the Romeo-Juliet theme underwent unimaginable alchemy and
attracted to itself a vast encrustation of correspondences and transformations.
The result was a mythiciation of Romeo and Juliet. They left, for Gwen
Herat, the invented world of Shakespeare's play and entered history, a
history of endless reincarnation shaped by the author's imagination from
similar tales of uncompromising love.
The volcano finally erupted in these 54 lyrics and their prologue, epilogue
and linking prose sequences. Written at white heat, they create an imaginative
environment of cloud, mists, ghostly presences, vast vistas, sweeping winds
and ardent utterance, her turbulent inspiration not infrequently sweeping
aside considerations of proof-reading, of grammar and syntax.
In this arena of Gwen Herat's imaginative experience, Romeo and Juliet
and even Mercutio, the Montagues and the Capulets have left the pages of
dramatic literature. They have been endowed with lives of their own. In
this other world, to quote from this volume, "Romeo searches for Juliet
and hastens to embrace her," while "her spirit approaches him"
and it becomes "a slow symphony wondrously played by the sweeping
wind of the evening."
|
