A few days have passed since the loss of one of the pioneering theatre directors and a versatile thespian from the era of Sri Lankan modern theatre. His capacity as a modernist theatre director, playwright and as an actor have enriched the Sinhala speaking theatre for nearly five decades.
In this paper I argued that Manorathne’s stage performance should be understood not as a reflection of psychological realism but a psychophysical acting practice which is related to a later version of Stanislavski, that his followers have promulgated.
Some theatre critiques and writers misleadingly connect Manorathne’s performance regime as a way of understanding ‘Method acting’ germinated in the USA, Yet, earlier I argued that the ‘Method’ is an American actor training system popularised through Lee Strasberg and other American actor trainers in the early 1950s and this so called Method has nothing to do with Manorathne’s performance practice. Hence, in this paper, I wish to extend my argument further and demonstrate how we could do justice to veteran actor Manorathne and his legacy of acting.
Psychological realism
One might wonder how theatre actors in Sri Lanka have been trained to act on stage. They further wonder whether these actors have directly or indirectly been influenced by a particular acting tradition/s. The answer to this question needs research on Sri Lankan theatre history. Nonetheless, actors in the Lankan theatre were directly or indirectly trained through a particular knowledge transferring model developed by certain theatre groups and individual directors in the past. For instance, some directors in the 1970s and 80s have been influenced by American or European theatre directors and those dominant acting pedagogues have been vaguely transferred through this knowledge transferring model which I would like to see as a ‘teacher-disciple’ model.
This knowledge transferring model is similar to the traditional ‘guru-shishyaparampara’ model where dance, drama and music teaching have been carried out in the region. If we apply this model to theatre practice, actors are subjected to train under a director’s guidance and they learn various approaches to acting on stage through direct contact. For instance, in Sarachchandra’s theatre ensemble, he used to train actors by a one to one direct contact with each. Later, actors’ skills are refined through on-the-job training. Manorathne’s acting practice and his formal training should also be considered as an on-the-job training. He is therefore a self-taught actor who has been apprenticed though his close encounters with directors and theatre ensembles.
During the 1970s and 80s, Sri Lankan theatre was dominated with American acting ideology, widely known as ‘psychological realism.’ Sri Lankan theatre directors who were fascinated by American and European playwrights undoubtedly embraced psychological realism as their ideological tool to find ‘realistic criteria’ in theatre acting. Yet as I argued in the foregoing, Manorathne or any other prominent actor in the Sri Lankan theatre has not been trained or gone through a rigorous and assiduous actor training based on Stanislavski’s teaching or American Method.
Mano and Method
A few authors have written about Manorathne’s approaches to theatre acting but they have misled the reader by contextualizing his acting practice within the psychological realism. For instance, Ranjith Dharmakeerthi articulates Manorathne’s acting legacy as a reflection of ‘Method’ and this Method Acting tradition is also incorrectly referred to as Stanislavski tradition of acting. Dharmakeerthi and a few others may have been in this hypothetical stance due to some historical incidents which took place in the early Sri Lankan theatre.
Most of the theatre critiques believed that Neumann Jubal had gone through psychophysical actor training system and that Sri Lankan actors have been trained by him. In his book ‘Stanislavaski and his Acting Method’ (1992), Dharmakeerthi argues how Gunasena Galappaththi had gone to Actor’s Studio in New York in the early ‘50s and learnt ‘Stanislavski’s Method’. Moreover, Dharmakeerthi believes that the finest example of an actor who follows Stanislavski’s ‘Method Acting’ is Jayalath Manorathne (Dharmakeerthi 1992, p. 147). With due respect to Ranjith Dharmakeerthi and his contribution to Sri Lankan theatre, I should say that Dharmakeerthi has misunderstood the fact that American Method resembles Stanislavski’s acting system. This assumption that ‘Method Acting’ is an actor training system developed by Stanislavski is a sheer mistake and a crude historical misconception. Categorizing Manorathne’s approaches to acting as ‘Method’ does not do justice to Manorathne’s approaches to theatre acting and misleads the reader by reducing Manorathne’s acting as a reflection of mere psychological realism. Stanislavski’s students such as, Richard Boleslavski and Maria Ouspenskaya visited America and shared their expertise with theatre groups. But American Method was originally developed through the intervention of a few people such as, Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, and Robert Lewis. Later the main protagonists of such Method were Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner.
Cartesian split
Lee Strasberg’s teaching on acting was clearly demarcated by Cartesian ways of seeing the human body and mind as a split. He simply understood the human being as something which has inner and outer dimensions. As Strasburg believed ‘Affective memory, for example, assumed that past memories locked within held the essential truth about a person’s identity’ (McConachie, B.A., 2005, P. 89). The private ‘self ‘is the pure element of the human being and this pure and untouched inner content can be extricated if the actor taps into this inner world by visiting past memories or emotional recall. I call this type of acting embedded in proscenium theatre as ‘Cartesian theatre’ because the process of acting and the theatre reception are understood in dichotomous ways. If I explain this idea further, the actor’s work would be understood as, inner vs outer, body vs mind and reason vs emotion, etc. In this paradigm, the skilled actor’s task would be to bring forth inner contents to the public through her/his body. The body in this sense is a mere mechanical device or flesh (mind is the all-knowing entity).
The Sanskrit idea of Pāthre (container) also signifies this metaphoric construction of the actor’s body. Pāthre or a‘container’ is a physical structure in which one could fill water or other things. Similarly, the actor fills the empty character with her/his flesh and blood to enliven the character. Human beings are thus understood as a split of body and mind, the character as a unified wholeness, author as the sole agent, text as the basis of all meanings, language as the communication medium.
Manorathne and his contemporaries have embraced such philosophical understanding of the theatre, actor, text, audience and the meanings related to modernist theatre making. The predominant factor of acting in such theatre tradition was the play text and its hidden meaning to be extracted by the actor’s interpretation of the text. That may be the reason why Manorathne’s articulation of the process of acting is more akin to psychological realism than other modes of practices. Talking about his approaches to acting Manorathne argues thus:
In the1980s Sarachchandra was preparing to stage Vessanthara. I used to shed tears when I give away my kids in the play. In order to do so, I used to recall my elder brother’s demise and trigger my emotional involvement with him. One day, when I finished my rehearsal, Prof. Sarachchandra came up to me and said, “Mano, the performance is good. But I want to remind you that crying and acting are two different things”’ (Cited in Dharmakeerthi 1992, p. 159 – Author translation).
Manorathne here demonstrates his affinity to psychological realism and also the confusion of his faith on the realistic acting practice. I am surprised to see why he had applied such a method to engage with a stylistic performance, because he was rehearsing a stylistic play written and directed by Sarachchandra. Sarachchcandra’s stylistic approaches do not need such emotional recalling or such ‘inner content’ to be visible in the outer physicality to perform well. My argument is, whether the actor performs in a realistic or stylistic performance the actor’s job would be to perform ‘task emotions’ or the emotions that are generated through the given circumstances. Therefore, Sarachchandra’s conclusion to Manorathne’s performance is very interesting and also drastic because Sarachchandra clearly and simply teaches Manorathne the difference between real life situation and theatricality or the task emotions and real emotions. Here, Sarachchandra undoubtedly refers Diderot’s thesis: If you really want to move the audience; you should remain unmoved’ (Diderot, D., 1883).
Lokadharmi/Natyadharmi
My question is, why Manorathne’s gesticulations and postures captured in still photographs and video footage are very much akin to stylistic and unnatural per se? In other words, if a researcher observes Manorathne’s acting practices captured in many theatre works and film footage, they signify his affinity to a different type of acting practice than realism or naturalism.
As a close observer of Manorathne’s theatre acting, I argue that Manorathne is a manipulator of psychophysical acting. When I say psychophysical acting, I do not intend to split the physical aspects of acting from the psychical or his involvement as mere physical without psychical register, but it is a psychophysical performance, a fact that this physicality and psychical involvement are interwoven.
David Garrick in his famous essay titled, ‘An Essay on Acting’ argues, ‘There are two different kinds of exhibitions, viz. tragedy and comedy; the first fixes her empire on the passion, and the more exulted contractions and dilations of the heart; the last, though not inferior, (quotidemscience) holds her rule over the less ennobled qualities of human nature, which are called the humours.Now in some cases, passions are humours, and humours passions’ (Cole, T. and Chinoy, H.K. eds., 1954, p. 134). In this short description, Garrick identifies two types of theatre making, tragedy and comedy and also sees some distinctive differences between them in terms of acting. But again he says, ‘passions are humours and humours are passions’ which signifies the overlapping of tragedy and comedy or the crossover of actor’s approaches to mental and physical. Manorathne’s understanding of theatre is also divided into two categories: lokadharmi and natyadharmi(Dharmakeerthi 1992).
He sees these two separate approaches as two ways of getting involved with characters on stage. When Garrick categorizes his performance within tragedy and comedy, Manorathne’s discourse of acting is derived from the classical Sanskrit theorization of dramatic performance.
In line with this, one can conclude that in order to understand Manorathne’s performance on stage, one needs to get away from the psychological realism but needs to pay attention to the psychophysical tradition mastered by Meyerhold, Stanislavski, Artaud and Grotowski.
Conclusion
Manorathne left a myriad of stage performances for the next generation of theatre practitioners and scholars. He has acted in more than 70 stage plays and his experience as a theatre actor is still hidden and unspoken within this legacy of acting.
The documentation of his acting practices and theatre productions are available for future researchers who are keen on exploring Manorathne’s secrets of acting. Hence our task would be to tap into these treasures and unveil the methods and manners of acting that Manorathne has mastered over five decades. In doing so, we would be able to do justice to Manorathne’s contribution to Sri Lankan theatre and his acting practice.
The writer is Professor of Theatre and Drama and Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo.