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| Wednesday, 16 July 2003 |
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On Books and Writers by Ajith Samaranayake Proficient in two genres This column opens with an old piece written in 1976 on R. R. Samarakoon for this same newspaper. Novelist and dramatist Samarakoon has recently broken a long silence with a novel titled "Thalamala". This article was written under the pseudonym "Asela". R. R. Samarakoon's entire creative life has gravitated between fiction and the theatre. With scrupulous impartiality he has paid equal attention to both genres. He has written four novels and staged four plays and in both fields has won the much coveted state awards as well. There is reason then for R. R. Samarakoon to be happy, for the results have so obviously been commensurate with his efforts. His last years offering to theatregoers won the award for the best original script at the 1975 Drama Festival. That was "Idama". His last novel "Ge Kurullo" won the award for the best work of fiction published in 1971. Samarakoon's creative career began, as with many young people with his migration to Colombo in the sixties. Naturally therefore, the dichotomy and conflict between the rural-way of life and the ethos and the life style of the less discriminating, if more sophisticated, urban society have been at the heart of Samarakoon's creative efforts particularly in fiction. As a novelist Samarakoon dramatically shot up to literary eminence with "Ek Sabhya Kathavak". One of the few works of fiction still in Sinhala literature to have imaginatively explored the spiritual life of Sri Lanka's upper-middle class. In "Ek Sabhya Kathavak" Samarakoon, the village boy from Nawalapitiya who had arrived in the metropolis to occupy his little niche in the massive machinery of the state service, vividly brought to life with sympathy and percipience the social and domestic existence of the country's elite, living uneasily in the midst of society's transition but making little effort to relate to the emerging new order. There was no social envy in Samarakoon's portrait of life in Colombo-7, mansions (the setting, moreover was not Cinnamon Gardens but suburban Nawala, but that is by the way). There was only an implied statement of the inevitability of social change (the old order collapsing, giving way to the new) and the need to sympathetically adapt to and identify with the new social forces. The discredited old order, heavy with the weight of accumulated past sins, is apparently in its death throes and the more sensitive sections of the bourgeoisie like the CAS protagonist of "Ek Sabhya Kathavak- Chandana Malalasekera- are unrepentingly defecting. But there is life still left in the old order and until through a united effort it is finally routed and new forms of social organisation and a new hierarchy of values is fashioned, the future would indeed be bleak even to those who out of an honest intellectual awareness join the ranks of the earth's wretched.That is what Samarakoon said in "Ek Sabhya Kathawak" published in 1967. If in his fiction Samarakoon was concerned with broad issues relating to society and the social being, his recent plays have been more topical and even sometimes unabashedly polemical. "Idama" (as its very name implies) was prompted by the country's momentous land reform, Samarakoon said. What had really inspired him was the new awakening which followed in his own village as a result of land reform, he said. Samarakoon's plays are distinguished by their dynamic, if rather simplified, character, explosive situations and racy dialogues. All his plays have been originals. " It is better to attempt and fail at an original than translate or adapt a play," Samarakoon believes. Samarakoon says that there is a new audience coming now to the Sinhala theatre. They are a critical audience and will no longer be owerawed by the judgments delivered in a oracular manner by critics. " They will see a play for themselves before they judge", he says. The theatre too, is developing rapidly each day. "We don't have so many of the facilities for which there is such a crying need and which are so necessary", Samarakoon said. In this context certainly the efforts of young dramatists to keep the theatre alive deserve all the praise one could command, he added. The confluence of a critical audience and a virile theatre is a happy augury indeed for Sinhala drama.
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