Have you ever tasted ‘Dunhinda Belimal Cola’? Perhaps it may be possible in a future not too distant from today. But I dearly hope it will not come to pass, for what bodes the actual creation of such a concoction is our nation’s complete engulfment in a commercialism that strips us of any sense of national culture and also our wealth of national resources. As I watched at the Tower Hall theatre on 30 August, Chalaka Ranasooriya’s Sinhala stage drama Maraka Linde Savariyak (A trip in the Well of Death) it was evident that this was a work of theatre which has an urgent message for Sri Lanka in the wake of the large scale multinational commercialisation that is being planted in our island nation. And I assure you Ranasooriya does not use theatre as a medium to deliver a longwinded diatribe from the stage. The art of theatre as a means of communication through entertainment was masterfully demonstrated through this play.
This highly engaging and enjoyable stage drama is brought to life through the acting talents of Malkanthi Jayasinghe, Jagath Chamila, Umayangana Wickremasinghe, Wasanthi Ranwala, Lanka Bandaranayake, Madhushan Hathlahawaththa, Shalitha Gunawardena, Theruni Ashangsha, Thankshila Himashi, S. I. Samarakkody, and Rohan de Silva.
What one finds in Maraka Linde Savariyak is a very imaginative concept that takes contemporary Sinhala theatre forward in postmodernist story techniques for the stage. The degree of ‘inter-textuality’ in the play is remarkable and deserves praise. The late great Sinhala novelist and scholar Martin Wickremasinghe’s celebrated novel Gamperaliya provides a solid base for departure towards a story that delivers an incisive and thunderous socio-political statement dealing with the direction our country is heading. It was impactful. It was powerful. I was completely in its grip.
The story starts off as several characters from Gamperaliya, while on an annual pilgrimage, happen to catch an odd radio broadcast that is not ‘in tune’ with their times. It reveals to be a radio broadcast from Colombo which makes them incorrectly conclude that it is about the character Jinadasa Lamahewa (who in Gamperaliya goes missing, and the certainty of his death being riddled with doubt cast by his widow), is not dead but in Colombo, and about to perform in a circus feat known as the Well of Death. Ranasooriya welds existing literature with his own story concept through a script that breaks boundaries between genres and delivers a scenario where time and chronology are blurred. The past meets the future within the fold of ‘fiction for the stage’, and veins of a literary work travel into a theatrical one.
What the audience is shown after the southerners from the Gamperaliya story board the train from Matara to Colombo is an arrival to a futuristic Colombo that can be considered a dystopian future in Sri Lanka centred on a Colombo that is overrun by foreign capital. Among the obvious facets of this futuristic Sri Lanka in this play is the state of the mass media. Ranasooriya delivers much food for thought about how ‘news’ today is about ‘entertainment’. Both amusement and disdain are evoked in the way news segments are presented in this play as sensationalised reports as opposed to factual reportage when the ‘news story’ is about the speculated suicide attempt of ‘Jinadasa’.
What is further perceptively put is how the media creates a culture of ‘soft gambling’ today through SMS based systems of correctly guessing the outcome of a particular event in order to win prizes. Whether Jinadasa will jump or not from the skyscraper located in the Chinese owned port city in Colombo becomes the basis of an SMS competition which speaks of a ‘vulture culture’ driving the mass media. ‘Vulturism’, if one may give such an expression, seems to be the ethos that drives the success of the mass media as seen in this play. In the substance of this play is a portrayal of noxious mediatisation of public perceptions and crafting society’s ‘collective psyche’. Another interesting point to ponder on comes up in showing how the media makes a mockery of people making them clownish characters and stripped of their personality. One example is the ‘emasculated’ makeup artist who acts like a pansy to be secure in his job.
A strong vein of critical thinking delivered through the text of this play is how deep implications of social order transformation occur in the face of new wealth. While social transformation that deconstructs rigid oppressive hierarchism in society may be seen as ‘progressive’, what kind of ‘values’ the newly rich bring to the community is focused on in this play by discussing the scenario in Gamperaliya, which is best depicted through the character of Piyal who upsets the status quo in the village through his education and new wealth.
What Ranasooriya appears to nuance is how in the face of new foreign wealth streaming into our country, a class of crassly amoral newly rich ruling elite who have no regard for depth of culture or tradition will emerge and view everything and everyone as a commodity. This perspective hints at how there was a faint fibre of that line of thought in the character of Piyal in Gamperaliya who saw his wealth as a virtue. In view of the old school values that are spoken of in favourable light over ‘bourgeois might’, Ranasooriya’s play speaks of a salutary rightwing outlook.
In view of rejecting foreign incursion to economically colonise the country there is an unapologetic olden rightwing stance in Maraka Linde Savariyak which proudly projects a national minded people’s outlook in response to exploitative neoliberal international capitalism that disregards national sentiments or borders of sovereign nations.
One of the most hard hitting points spoken with true Sri Lankan cultural nuance woven into it is when the southerners say that although the occultist practices in the south can deal with devils and demons and other malignant spirits, they have no voodoo to chase away ‘dragons’. Maraka Linde Savariyak is an ingenious work of contemporary Sri Lankan theatre. A critique of our times that is sheer dynamite. A play that every Sri Lankan ought to watch. I for one believe this brilliant work deserves waves of standing ovations.