Confessions of an aesthete

Piyal Kariyawasam on the complexity of creativity:

Aravinda HETTIARACHCHI

Theatre as a medium of expression is essential. I feel alive in theatre and feel like living in another different universe. Performing as a director in the theatre is amazing. Thus, theatre becomes a remedy to my sufferings, suppressions, and depressions of life. Then these thoughts transform into a form of deep aesthetic discussion or dialogue.

And I feel I am dominating my own feelings in a different context. Contrarily, sometimes, these aesthetic sufferings dominate me. This is how I came to feel that I am living in another universe, an existence of another subjective arena. Thus my eagerness draws me to see relationships and dark sides of human mind.

Theatre rewriting

I have read various eastern and western theatrical as well as literary writers. Whenever I come across a great author or a playwright (especially Dostoevsky and Milan Kundera) and compare the diversities of my mind with their way of thought, I find a similar thinker in me. I feel as I am rewriting them. The American thriller writers are also very much influenced in the character of my play writing.

If I analyze and criticize this moment, I am sort of converting some philosophically classical theatre texts into an exciting structure. Modern thriller writers of United States have used these structures. The social life of our country today is very lethargic. Everything that happens around me is criminal.

Crimes in Sri Lanka are very naïve compared with the developed countries. They have no philosophical influence. For instance, the crimes of Chicago city are very philosophical. Criminals use highly advanced language. Yet I could find a quite similar formation of crime philosophy in my childhood.

Mythical background

I was brought up in Monaragala, a mythical village in the 1980s. I met a lot of characters such as hunters, monks and murderers. My father is a very mythical character. He is a farmer. I read a lot of written texts and was very eager to know the political situation of the country.

He directed me to listen to the radio and to read the newspapers in childhood. I have seen a lot of murders and sexual activities in this village. Today I understand that

these killings and sexual activities have had a particular metaphorical phenomenon in philosophy. Stage is a working field where these diversities of my soul appear.

Theatre is so significant comparing to other mediums. I can change the formation of a play from one performance to another without shifting its plot. It could be developed into a higher level of excitement. You won't get this opportunity in cinema. While you finish a production you cannot change it again. Yet theatre is a live medium. Audience's reactionary experience is an immediate and a relevant one. Theatre has a very ritualistic behavior in essence. The character actors prove this in rehearsals.

Freezing contexts

My total production is a freezing of real time-space into another. This context is very similar to the films of Tarkovsky. I like illusions, hallucinations and nightmares happen while I am working in a production.

They create a different time-space in my rehearsals. Consequently, the performing characters of my play are bound to grasp this different time-space as well. Thus they create a different present tense in stage. This is totally different from the actual present situation.

This ability of time-space transformation has made the theatre an incredibly powerful medium. I alone entertain this aptitude of the theatre. This is why I like to call myself a dramatist. I am not a popular dramatist with a vast audience. Yet while I am spending alone with my rehearsals, I feel like existing within the precise state in my soul.

Mysterious playwright

My first production is a translation of Harold Pinter's 'Dumb Waiter'. Pinter is a very mysterious playwright. I was trying to understand the two characters of this play. Pinter worked mostly with words until 2008.

He, in his Paris review, explained that the common language and words are using by certain authorities as in Kafka's Castle. He unclosed the concepts under powerful authorities in Victorian language such as crime, punishment, religion, sin and etc. While the authorities victimized you, you come to a certain point without an independent word of human expression.

In 1930, he got lesser marks for Latin language to enter the Oxford or the Cambridge universities. It is sort of a similar experience my own generation of this country face with English language. Pinter said he was trying to make a third language out of poetic and dramatic texts to understand the depth of human relationships. He assumed the present language is shy, sick and a comedy of menace without authentic ideas.

Astonishing language

The way Pinter uses the silences and poses in dramatic scripts are very interesting. His language astonished me. Yet while I touch the live theatre on my own, it made me difficult to grasp the real Pinter context. His scripts wont indicate any theatrical directions. He signs one or two mere words within the brackets of the script.

Thus I had to find a relevant performing formation of my own. I am fond of these difficulties in stage and I work hard to overcome them. Theatre is an empirically surprising zone. We have to provide surprises to the audience. In 1994, my two actors, my wife and my university colleagues found some interesting points by working on Pinter. We lived in an experimental condition in stage at that point of time.

And we had enough time. We were hanging around theatres, cinemas, and the Colombo Public Library as youngsters of Vandalism. And we were capable enough to find something similar to Harold Pinter in practical stage.

Present tense

We were aggressive of then traditional theatre in Sri Lanka. We had to work out another form of 'present tense' in theatre. And while I am reading some Pinter's criticism and other text today, I grab some significant factors related to my play.

In 2001, a play of my own ('Me vs I') appeared in theatre. This play was inspired by the 'Death and the Maiden', a play of a Chilean play writer, Ariel Doughman. I met this experience just after my university life.

I saw the political party activities surrounded in the university premises during the 1989 insurgency. Students of then university were thoroughly involved in these activities. Yet while they become mature in a traditional sort of a way, most of them became the exact opponents to their own views of politics. And they killed and erased their own past. This contradiction unclosed me a fake.

This was similar to Pinter and Doughman. So I decided to write down its main figures in a paper. I've meditated this experience through the life of my friends, wife and my self. This was an exercise of seeing my own unconscious ghost.

I entertained this ghost inside the theatre and gained good response from the audience.

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