Liberating Shakespeare
A biographical mischief maker once claimed that I grew up with
Shakespeare. As a schoolboy I did roll through Shylock, Mark Antony,
Hotspur, Hamlet in long and short spells. As an undergrad majoring in
English I took the Shakespeare pummelling that we students were heir to,
returning it in good part and good heart years later as a University
Lecturer in English and Fine arts.
Shakespeare expert
-Liberating.jpg) |
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A scene
from the drama of the competition. |
My undergrad days rolled me back into acting in the most serious and
dignified theatre the country then produced, either in Sinhala or
English, but it was when I became the 1st ever English Honours student
to produce a Sinhala play that I tumbled into some kind of history - not
through Shakespeare but Chekov.
Incidentally Chekov competes with Shakespeare as the most produced
foreign dramatist in Sri Lanka. I hope Obinamuni Gamini de Silva,
President Shakespeare Centre Sri Lanka these competitions will induce
both teachers and school children to study our own theatre history, let
alone the Shakespeare texts, which is an obvious compulsion. Our country
has been tuned to Shakespeare from the 19th century and many schools
have been farming the big guy! My own school is Richmond College, Galle,
and some exciting Shakespeare resonances carry me back there. Sri
Lanka's 1st and greatest Shakespeare scholar - E.F.C.Ludowyke, came from
Richmond, and then at Cambridge University he knocked the pants off all
the competing British, American, Canadian, Australian, West Indian and
Asian scholars to win the coveted Oldham prize for Shakespare
scholarship.
What is even more exciting about this Shakespeare expert is that he
came back to this country of his birth to become not only our 1st Sri
Lankan Professor of English but our 1st most inventive and subversive of
English play - producers. Going only once or twice to Shakespeare, he
pushes Sudhrake's Sanskrit "Clay Cart" into King George's Hall, also
calls on the 2000 year old Chinese "Lady Precious Stream", and
introduces Germany's great Brecht as early as 1949 via "The Good Woman
of Setzuan" - ( our good, good woman being that Shakespeare teacher -
director Jeane Pinto) - and then produces a Sinhala Gogal " Kapuwa
Kapothi" with the supreme sun in our theatre horizon Ediriweera
Sarachchandra as adapter- transcreator of the Russian play.
Bilingual transaction
Ludowyke's readings of Shakespeare in class were a treat. He never
resorted to or encouraged this thing called elocution and would have
pooh - poohed the colonial allegiance to the Trinity College of Speech
Drama and laughed his guts out at what's happening today. Yes!
Undoubtebly! You long-suffering teachers and students of Drama and
English should cherish this choice tale I'm going to relate about a
local English T.V. presenter. One day I and some teacher-friends of mine
distinctly heard this young woman uttering that lovely Sinhala term for
urine - "Tchoo" in her Englishy talk when she only meant "Two"! Ah the
tchoo-chewing vulgaries of our imitative neo-colonial vocal culture!
This is certainly not the kind of bilingual transaction that we'd
savour. Judging over a recent schools Sinhala Drama Competition Haig
Karunaratna and I were witness to a most lovable Bottom mischievizing a
very lively "Midsummer Night's Dream". You must go for these comps, try
taking part. We also saw a wonderful Sinhala "Oedipus Rex" there. You
have to open yourselves to these transactions. I wonder whether you've
ever heard of the very highly rated "radical" (as the critics claimed)
"uniquely resouceful" Peradeniya University "Hamlet" transcreation. The
only reliable scholarly account of Shakespeare productions in Sri Lanka
(written by Proff. Ashley Halpe) historizes this transcreation of
Shakespeare's most demanding play. Oh I know you doers of Shakespeare
have sometimes made us sit up when you present your own not-so-little
Shakespeares.
School boys and girls have with lusty convictions and ease continued
to shake up society's given antitheses between male and female
masuculine and feminine.
Open questions
It's possible with young men and women sporting the same age. On a
visit to Germany I found myself often mistaking boys for girls and girls
for boys - in their unisex dress. Earlier today on this stage we saw how
Newstead brought such vigour and beauty to their transformations as they
truly tamed Shakespeare's shrew. But what of boys playing mature women?
Only the other day we were made to witness a young fellow taking us
through a difficult Cleopatra with courageous skill, - so what? We might
say. Shakespeare study and Shakespeare acting prise open questions
regarding power and gender and runaway notions we've got from the west
about sexism. It's time we liberate ourselves by going to our own
theatre traditions to consider these problems.
I re-quote from my Ludowyke Memorial talk: My select model is the
Kolam and the well known "Jasaya-Lenchina" - I hope to god you have
heard of these dramatics! Yes. Kolam is a masked dance drama which
developed to use song and spoken idiom confined to a few places in the
southern coastal areas - a folk theatre performed sparodically now.
Power-play
The central situation is the "eternal triangle". Jasaya, the
washerman has brought a mistress to live with him. Lenchina his wife an
amourous woman married against her will laments her fate and complaints
to the Mudali the willage functionary, intermediary official in the
colonial order. The case is tried after a whole little farcical drama is
played out where the official a man of higher case tries to flirt with
Lenchina and Jasaya plays the hell out of him behind his back. Of
course, it's very sexist because the jokes are sexist, the woman is the
object, all that sure.
Yet we have to tread carefully over this particular text because
Jasaya is a half cripple apart from being of lower caste. He has a lot
of fun at the expense of the dignitary. The power-play is ambiguous,
exciting because the comedy after all empowers a physically and socially
handicapped man.
Sexist impulses
The way he gyrates on one and a half legs and weaves in and out of
the Mudali's figure and releases his jokes demonstrates how the dance
form itself is utilized as a vehicle of power and he a cripple! At best
the performer becomes one of 3 best performers I have seen anywhere. The
fact that the Mudali is also an intermediary in the local government
order of the same colonial order empowers Jasaya's comedy dance. As for
the sexism which is blatant and which stereotypes the woman even as an
object inviting sex there is another text here. After all the actors are
all men and the audience all know it and enjoy that very fact that man
is mimicking the woman and is not a real woman.
The descriptive satire I think is also directed at a man playing a
woman and the "fun" is an ambiguous physical purgation of sexist
impulses. Hence the disruption of sexual differences that Catherine
Belsey talks of in the Shakespeare comedies in an essay in Alternative
Shakespeare (New Accents -Gen-Editorn Terence Hawkes, this volume edited
by John Drakakis), may be different: "Shakespearean comedy can be read
as disrupting sexual difference, calling to question that set of
relations between terms which proposes as inevitable antithesis between
masculine and feminine, man and woman." |
