Medical professor and his teleplays
Professor Sunanda Mahendra
 TELEDRAMAS: A few years ago the National Television (Jatika
Rupavahini) discovered an unusual talent in a medical professional who
not only made the medical awareness of certain sicknesses in the best
creative manner possible, but also helped the viewer to elevate from the
state of banality and sentimentality it overplayed to the audience
through the projection of soap operas.
This alternative reference is made to Professor Nimal Senanayaka, a
university medical professor and a freelance writer in the visual
medium, whose work Ella Langa Walauva (The Mansion by the Waterfall, [A
Sarvodaya Vishvalekha Publication]) became one of the successes and a
talking point among the viewers.
This is a remarkable event in the history of teleplay writing and
publishing in our country, which presumably is mostly and commonly seen
as a shoddy art, practised mostly now by mediocre tele-writers and
directors who constantly manage to spin up a sentimental narrative with
various situations underlying no great human significance.
I am not going to generalize this verdict, as there a few who show
signs of the exception to the regarded rule.
Reading through the pages of the printed version and visualizing the
effect the serialized version based on it, and the effect it had on the
spectator some years ago, I feel that Professor Senanayaka, and director
Dharmasena Patiraja had a clear vision to introduce via the characters
and situations.
Though the main idea and experience embedded therein rests on a
leper, Gratien hamu [ by now it is said that the sickness leprosy is
eradicated thanks to latest medical findings], whose relatives believe
that he has left the country to a foreign strand in order to become a
lawyer, is just the story outline, there lies underneath a host of other
mysterious and sensitive situations that keep the audience with a sense
of visionary impact.
In very short sequences, the entire narrative unfolds and the printed
work could be read as a novel where more dialogues ensue over the
commentarial areas and technicalities.
The loyalty of family inheritors to their Walauva, the ancestral
house, the great respect with which they deal on matters pertaining to
the possession, the value system added to it, the mannerisms they impart
to their loyal servants as their material possessions over the years,
and the ultimate challenges of the very same factors and objectives from
the outer world, are also some of the factors underlined in the
narrative of Ella Langa Waluva.
Though written in the form of a detective story, the actual detective
is no other person than a medical doctor who finds the missing person in
the family - the one who is believed to have gone abroad. He had been in
hiding in the very same ancestral house like a prisoner, suffering from
leprosy.
This detection is interlinked with a sensitive layer of romance as
well as a mysterious overshadow of suspense of a living killer whose
loyalties and good mannerisms are hinted as futile actions in an
underdeveloped world. The central experience is also interspersed with
haunting scenes of apparitions, which, for the most part, become shadows
obsessed by their own beliefs and fancies.
As the narrative is set in a post-war period, the imaginative events
are skillfully created. This printed text, I feel, should be of help to
some of the fellow writers of the visual medium enabling them to grasp
the basics of human experiences they often miss in their creative
process.
The screenplay goes as a the spinal cord in the actual visual
creations, and the publishers are scared to print some of the
imaginative situations as created by the trained writers of this nature.
At a recent seminar held at the Medical faculty, University of
Peradeniya, on the Professor Senanayaka’s teleplays, it was shown that
he had two-fold functions in his creations, especially in the role of
writing.
Firstly, he is one of the few who attempt to be rather selective in
the human experiences from the world classics, such as Dicken’s Great
Expectations and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (to cite two of his
adaptations), which eventually became the breeding ground for good
teleplays and secondly the interpolation of the local flavour into the
body structure with a mission, which culminates in the indigenous sense
of adaptation resulting in better viewing.
Over the years this was observed as a welcome variant to the bad
original creations on the part of the hurried writer, director and
producer in search of an instant script for the stage, television, and
the wide film screen.
One of the finest works to have come from Professor Senanayaka’s pen,
I suppose, is the recently shown teleplay script Mayaranga, where the
influence of his association of classics as well as the intermix of the
local experiences were exhibited to its brim.
To his credit, he has written more than ten medical handbooks both in
English and Sinhala, and out of the gamut of teleplays, four printed
teleplay scripts are available, all of which are prescribed as
supplementary readers at the school level.
The need for better writers, especially for the television and film,
should emerge from better reading material. I am not too sure whether
there are publishers who are keen on printing television play scripts
taking into account the value of the role of the writer.
As the year 2007 marks the introduction of the subject of Mass
Communication at the school level, perhaps these teleplay scripts will
be of use to the teacher as well as the student of the subject in order
to clarify some of the matters pertaining to the creative side of
writing.
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