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Sanda Langa Maranaya captures Jaffna audience
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Kaushalya Fernando, a multiple award winner for her talented performances in theatre, teledrama and cinema as well as an English language teacher, is the director of Sanda Langa Maranaya.
The play Sanda Langa Maranaya won several national awards at the State Drama Festival in 2005 such as the best production, the best direction, the best translated script, the best music, the best choreography and the best debut direction.
The production was able to grab national awards for the best supporting actress and the best costumes as well.
The performances of Sanda Langa Maranaya in Jaffna were organized by the Trikone Art Circle with financial assistance of the UNDP Small Grant Fund. Dharmasiri Bandaranayake's contribution towards the organisation of the performances amidst much hardship owes a special mention here.
He had also assisted greatly in the organizing the performances of the play "Ritual" and film festivals in Jaffna earlier. Dharmasiri Bandaranayake holds a key position among the artists who strives to bring about ethnic unity through art.
Sinhala stageplays
Due to the success of his effort, the percentage of Tamil audience viewing the Sinhala stageplays has been increasing.
Sanda Langa Maranaya depicts the reality of the agonizing heart in a sensitive manner through genuine experiences of the human life. The playwright sensitizes the audience of the suffering of women in this journey of life without a course through triangle of love of a prospective bride, an unmarried youth and a married young man.
violent nature
According to Lorca, his plays emphasize violent nature of the long simmering terrorism and the anxieties of the human heart. This is evident in Sanda Langa Maranaya. This play has globally conquered many forms of performing art including ballet, musical as well as cinema in many languages.
Through adapting the recreation of an alien culture and nurturing characters familiar to our local culture in it, Sanda Langa Maranaya introduces many realistic characters who we meet in our daily life. It is clearly manifested in the choreography and the music used appropriately by the director, in the scene of the wedding.
Sanda Langa Maranaya should be commended as an adaptation for the fact that the performance of the actors intermingle both the qualities of the realism and surrealism in theatre styles.
Especially the performance of the maid (Lakmini Seneviratne) effectively reflects the realistic as well as the surrealistic styles which obviously make it stand out among all the other performance sin the production. It should be mentioned here that certain setbacks in the performance of the prospective bride negatively affected the quality of the production at times.
lullabies
The scene of the mother and the grandmother singing lullabies to the baby is very successful in it choice of music and the quality of performance blending together harmoniously. The characters are effectively play through the identification of space between desolation and jubilation, on the part of the performing artistes.
At times the audience felt the anxiety of the artistes. However, the smooth flow of the dialogues and the langauge which is subtly connected to the theme running through the play like a thread were added effects.
tragic death
The audience was shocked and distraught by the scene of the tragic death, the widows in black appearing on stage, the funeral procession as well as the darkness on stage at the last scene. at the same time this whole ambience was powerful enough to pose a question in the viewer's mind.
Lighting in different shades reflected on stage and the cyclorama successfully created the apt mood for each scene.
The furniture, props and the costumes used similar to those which were used in 1933 in Spanish culture. The manipulation of the scenes, artistic presentation was at a superior level and the songs and poems in the play had a close affinity to those in a European stageplay.
After a long time, the Tamil audience in Jaffna had an opportunity to enjoy a realistic theatre production genuinely felt by the heart.
It must be mentioned here that due to the effective advertising of Sanda Langa Maranaya in Jaffna, the theatre hall was houseful. Through Sanda Langa Maranaya, the director and the performers were successful in capturing the concentration of the audience for nearly one and a half hours.
Finally, it must be reminded that it is the responsibility of the relevant authorities to give the Jaffna audience opportunities to enjoy these kind of high quality theatre productions in the future.
The writer is Executive Director, Drama Active Theatre Movement in Jaffna.
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