I went to the Wendt on Friday of January 21 this year, after a considerable interregnum of theatre caused by the current pandemic, to witness the opening night of veteran Sinhala playwright and theatre director Rajitha Dissanayake’s latest offering to the stage: ‘2019, Jooli Maasaye Dawasak’ which carries its title in English as ‘A Day in July 2019’.
The opening night was received well with a near full house. It felt fabulous to be seated under the gentle darkness of the Wendt after quite some time. And it can be said that what I myself and my friend from school days, Yohan Ferreira, the founder of Drama Sri Lanka, who sat to my right, witnessed that evening was a stage play that can be heartily applauded as a work of theatre that speaks volumes of contemporary Sri Lanka’s ‘communal psyches’ and ‘national consciousness’.
The stagecraft of ‘A Day in July 2019’ was characteristic of Rajitha Dissanayake’s functional minimalism. And amidst the minimalist stage sets, which portray in two successive scenes two separate flats of an apartment housing complex, Dissanayake constructs yet another stage play that shows the consistency of his ideological standpoints and political beliefs. He is, I believe, a centre–left liberal whose politics is engrained in this work.
The basic story premise
A bomb scare arises in an urban apartment housing complex and residents are gripped by fear as well as a host of other emotions and concerns. Their movements are restricted, until the military ‘defuses’ the perceived threat. And amidst this, suspicions arise about a woman who entered an apartment that is not hers, and was noticed as a woman who had her head covered with a shawl. Concerns rise among several residents about the speculated outcome, if the apartment she is in, is forcibly entered by the military, assuming she is a bomber and will not comply with the military’s demand for entry in the course of the door-to-door security check to root out suspects.
Dissanayake’s stage play ‘Apahu Harenna Behe’ (No Return), which debuted more than ten years ago, raises the question as to whether, ‘a man and a woman cannot sit together and have a cup of coffee in the lobby of a five star hotel without being suspected as illicit lovers’. Can the same be said of the man and woman engaged in conversation in the opening scene of ‘A Day in July 2019’, I wondered.
A married man and an unmarried woman, spending time by themselves in a friend’s apartment sharing a bottle of wine. What would people be given to think? I wondered while seated under the gentle darkness of the Wendt. The opening scene of the play thus set the stage for a dilemma aggravated by events related to public security which ultimately leads to a tragedy which could have been avoided if society kindly allowed greater openness among people, to be a virtue.
Isolation
“Having no one to talk to, and having nothing to talk about, amounts to the same thing.” Says the character of Dhanuska played by Naleen Lusena, which to me is the line from the script that stands out to establish one of the central themes of the play, which is, ‘isolation’.
‘A Day in July 2019’ for all the contemporary political issues it theatrically chronicles, also contains in the subtext, perspectives about the psychological factor of isolation that affects many today. A person can be locked in solitude but not necessarily feel isolated. However when the feeling of isolation grips a person, it is (often) disempowering. And in ‘A Day in July 2019’ a story set in the Sri Lankan timeline between post ‘Easter bombings’ and pre ‘Covid pandemic times’, Dissanayake shows his audience that isolation can come in many forms in today’s incorrigibly politically excitable society where social structures that range from family to community and the state, are all moulded and directed by various ideological forces.
Enemies and enmities, allies and amities, loyalties and treacheries, identities and identity displacements are themes that strangely conflict and interlock at practically every level of life as shown in the events that unfolds between the host of characters in this play.
The character of Mathangaweera aka ‘Weere’, a Sri Lankan domiciled in Melbourne, professing staunch Sinhala consciousness, is pivotal to understand the crux of the current socio–economic–political system that Dissanayake critiques through this work of theatre. This character is crucial to glimpsing part of the human element behind the overarching forces driving the direction of the state’s agenda upon people, while gauging the character of Dhanushka is essential to see the isolation of the individual dissenter who refutes conformity to ‘popular beliefs’. These are polarities in the larger macro debate about forces conflicting in the fabric of society, compacted into micro form as characters that can believably slip into in layman terms.
Sinhala diasporic dichotomy
Among the striking themes that Dissanayake brings out in this play is the Sinhala ‘diasporic dichotomy’, demonstrably exemplified through the character of ‘Weere’. But Weere is much more than simply a migrant Sri Lankan with oversealous love for preserving the Sinhala race and heritage.
While the diasporic dilemma that affects many Sinhala people living overseas can be seen through this character, he is an individual out to achieve much more here in his ‘homeland’ than simply propagating ‘Sinhala revivalism’. The ‘charming, specious, nationalist, opportunist, capitalist’ is how I can best describe ‘Weere’ in a nutshell. A character that is layered and complex yet not ‘mystified’. A character brilliantly performed that evening by Sampath Jayaweera.
Characteristically, Dissanayake’s is not a theatre of bedazzling stagecraft with ‘spectacularity’ that visually wows the audience.
His signature stagecraft on the scale of projecting visual impressiveness cannot even dream to stand shoulder to shoulder with productions of the kind by Jerome L. De Silva or Jehan Aloysius. But Dissanayake’s theatre is about a different kind of entertainment with different objectives. He knows his audience. He knows how to craft his story for his audience. He knows his market. There is much in his scripts that show he knows the vernacular of the Sinhala speaking Sri Lankan middleclass.
A vernacular that delivers the layman’s styles of gossip, modes of anger, tones of excitation, angst, trepidations, isolations, mirth and sorrow and a host of other emotions that create the whole nine yards of what it means to capture the contemporary Sri Lankan voice in the medium of today’s average Sinhala. It is a Sinhala voice that conceives the ‘personal’, interlocking with the ‘collective’.
Dissanayake’s theatre is one that banks much on spoken language to build dialogue. Not just as verbal outpouring and interplay between characters on stage but also a dialogue which he as a theatre practitioner seems to desire to build with his audience. A social dialogue towards ‘discourse’ which his audience may develop out of the story he unfolds to them. In this regard ‘A Day in July 2019’ stands, in my opinion, as work superior in its ideological mettle to stage plays as ‘Nethuwa Beri Minihek’(A Man Much Needed) and ‘Adara Wasthuwa’ (Love Object) which are among previous stage plays by Dissanayake.
The thespian talent on stage
Commenting on the acting front, it must be noted that no one showed any signs of opening night jitters that evening. The talent on stage comprised of Nalin Lusena, Jayani Senanayake, Gihan de Chikera, Sampath Jayaweera, Anuradha Mallawaarachchi, Prasadini Athapaththu, Anuk Fernando, Sulochana Weerasinghe, Devinda Wickramasinghe and Lenin Liyanage.
In the opening scene, Lusena’s acting was more noticeably theatrical as it unfolded next to the performance of Sulochana Weerasinghe who played the role of Dinushi. Weerasinghe’s was a more relaxed natural style of acting. I did however notice her left foot moved in a circular manner when seated to sip wine; when her left leg was on top of her right leg, which could have been nervousness of the actor finding release unintentionally, or it could have been intentional, as part of Dinushi’s body language speaking the anxiety within.
It was great to see Gihan de Chickera back on stage after quite some time. His performance as Manoj, the friendly, gossipy, neighbourly, inquisitive, excitable, and somewhat edgy friend of Dhanushka added an appreciable vein of tastefully comic entertainment.
The army officer played by Anuradha Mallawaarachchi slightly stumbled on a line at the point of revealing that a woman was found in ‘Suraweera’s closed apartment’. But it didn’t cause Mallawaarachchi to fumble his line altogether. He avoided that pitfall deftly.
Special mention must be made of young thespian Anuk Fernando for a commendable performance as Ranuka. This was, I believe, the first prominent role played by Fernando in a stage play. A performance he delivered remarkably well. To a great extent the overall cast of players showed symmetry of acting talent which is to the credit of both the director and the actors.
This is a play that all Sri Lankans should watch. A stage play that should go beyond its original Sinhala medium. A play that should be translated to English, for the benefit of English conversant non Sinhala speaking Sri Lankans, [which includes a certain segment in Sri Lanka of Sinhala as well as Tamil ethnicities who are pretty much for all practical purposes English speaking monolinguals].A play that should be staged as a Tamil translation for the benefit of Sri Lankans who are Tamil speaking monolinguals. A play that should be staged to audiences in a country such as Australia which hosts a large number of the Sri Lankan Diaspora. I say this because Rajitha Dissanayake’s ‘A Day in July 2019’ can theatrically explicate much to Sri Lankans, wherever they may reside, about where they ought not to be heading.