Bakamuna Videe Basii, a play with substance

Namel WEERAMUNI

At a time when knowingly husbands, and unknowingly wives and daughters of the same family get pregnant go for abortions at the same time, and sometimes some other plays spew utter filth with invitations to have sex with corpses on stage, it is a pleasure to see something like Baka Muna Videe Basii that themes food for thought with substance.

A scene from Bakamuna

Rajitha Dissanayake is one of the foremost and serious playwrights that we have today. He is also one person who has to date attempted totally on originals. This is a characteristic feature in his dramatic carrier. A good playwright too he is with an imaginative directorial precision. Rajitha is Baka Muna Videe Basii’s dramatist.

It is his latest play. It is interesting, entertaining, theatrically rich, thought provoking and a success. The title signifies the crux what it’s about. Baka Muna or the owl is a bird that does not see during the day time. It becomes lively only when it is dark. The present day society is the same, the playwright suggests.

What is happening is unseen but allowed to happen. By whom? That is the question! Is it the public or the governance, or both? What he tells the audience is a symbolically woven reflection. He fleshes out it with a combination of stylized dramaturgical nuances all the way through a mechanism of forceful and convincing acting by gearing an experienced assemblage of a talented cast.

The playwright’s approach is indirect where the audience is driven to reflect back as to where we live and how we live. The whole meaning is hidden. What humbug we are in midst this social fabric, what a chaotic mess it is, and how corrupt it is, is the message the playwright attempts to unfold. Playwright perhaps may be scorning at the whole society which is blind as to what is happening in the day today life of the sum total social system that we live. We are just only cogs of that corrupt social wheel we peddle. And this is for survival! We are blind and cannot see what is truly happening around us because we are struggling to survive. It’s the state of unease, but tolerated.

I find Rajitha a dissector of social dilemma leaving it for the audience to solve it. He suggests no solutions but the reality of it’s underneath operation, and its subtle imbalance. It’s an ongoing operation that the successive governmental machineries have generated. This is something that had taken root particularly perhaps since the open economy market has come into being. It’s a social product where the subjects have become a set of fighting cocks for gain and power following the dictum of the survival of the fittest running on a competitive spree.

This is what the playwright silhouettes of the present day society with no morals or values, right or wrong. When I was watching the play two playwrights came to my mind, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, because of two things, the style of the language, and the social irony he imbues into his plays, besides the contemporary social relevance they reveal.

A park is bulldozed to construct a shopping centre. The environment is damned and ignored. The idea is to play out on the timber and to give the contract of the construction of the shopping centre to the party supporter in power. What repercussions and conflicts arise, how human relationships change and how it dwindles into a blithe of hypocritical excursion. What revolves around the play has to be judged only seeing it.

As an overall production, the technique Rajitha invents is quite mixed and varying. Yet it’s appealing.

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