Kalukumari - a meaningful play

Stage Review

Seeing K B Herath’s newest play, an original, that came on the boards recently at Bishop’s College Auditorium brought onto my mind the reflections of the settings of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho of 1960 and also Charles Dickens’ descriptions of Miss Havisham’s haunting rooms of her mansion.

Not that Kalukumari is a psychological thriller like Psycho, or a revenge loving woman on love like in Dickens’ novel. Kalukumari creates the ambiance of the play like in both I mentioned, a haunting waluwwa, a home of the nobles in which no one dwells but allowed to go into abeyance where only an apparition and bats linger.

Kalukumari is mentally nourishing and thought inflaming. It’s a challenge to the existing milieu of most of the defiled popular Sinhala theatre that has unfortunately devastated the appreciative bearings of the theatre going public by just journalistic, cheap and unimaginative laughs drumming at the imbalanced political system of the present day. In this backdrop theatre deplorably has been submerged and intellect insulted, appreciative ammunition zeroed and dulled.

Good and serious theatre is an art and not a polemical wasteland. It imbues emotions and reactions that provide food for thought and reformation, and a shot in the arm of intellect. Kalukumari does this with entertainment and its imposing theatricality.

In the absence of anybody living in the walauwwa the apparition is in command and its bats are her companion subjects.

To this realm an obedient and slavishly dutiful driver arrives with an ancestral descendant, Naren (Nalin Pradeep Uduwela). Naren is keen on keeping the waluawwa looked after well. He encourages and asks the driver (Sumith Ratnayake) to look after the place as the caretaker and live in it.

The driver regrets that he is unable to do so as he is in love with an innocent orphaned girl marooned by floods, and is awaiting his return to get married and live somewhere else. Nevertheless Naren gives hopes, expects and wants him as a dutiful and obligatory servant to come back with the bride and occupy the waluwwa to look after it as his own. The couple arrives and the drama unfurls symbolizing what a waluwwa is.

In short walauwwa in the play we understand is a symbolic representation of power with many underlined layers attached thereto. It can be in the past or in the present or of the future.

This representation essentially is a product of the past that inherently passes over time confined to its operating structure. It is political, societal, cultural and ancestral. Whatever the representation is, it’s of two dimensional divisions, of the powered over the underpowered. Powered placed dominant and the underpowered slaved. In this setup humaneness is absent and fades away even if it rises over emotions generically.

From the moment the driver arrives with his bride ghostly occurrences take place against their occupation of the premises. The apparition named Mayamma (Ferni Roshini) appears unnoticed to the couple from inside the mansion. She tries to devour both of them through her witchy powers, provoking and indicating them that they have no right to be there.

We understand that she apparently had been a dead maid of the mansion and survives in it haunting as a possessive subservient caretaker whilst its innate masters and their descendents are away. She therefore becomes a twofold grounded creature. She maintains a permanent presence in the waluwwa. It’s her mandatory duty she considers to take all the precautions to uphold its dignity, and avoid anybody coming into its precincts except its descendants, and see that none attempt to do so who fits not to its nobility order.

Immediately a surviving master arrives she turns into the most deferential and obligingly obedient servant human form as she subsequently becomes to Janani (Madhavi Malwatta) too after realizing that the latter is of waluawwa origin. This becomes clear at the very outset as soon as Naren arrives with his driver. Mayamma becomes totally a different creature in the presence of Naren behaving befittingly with the utmost respect and obedience that she can shower. But her treatment to the driver is vice-versa, becoming the crudest person possible scheming to chase him out.

Scenes from Kalukumari

We see here that the playwright characterizes Mayamma as an agent of power in its highest level of operation. It’s a kind of power vampirism of the higher order as a manipulative mechanism of its perpetuation, he depicts. Mayamma becomes a dichotomic and class differentiating symbol in its surroundings, broadly the society. This, I believe, is what Herath drives at. The presentation of this idea in the production may seem quite complicated and subtle. But we begin to feel that it’s a truism of the day. In order to remain in power undyingly, its wielders seem to be obsessed that they are endowed with it as a right to possess through dynastic succession, and the majority without power must revere that right and suffer the consequences blindly as the bats are in the walauwwa who hang out inside it. This is the manner, the playwright leads the audience to think symbolically as to how the power structure operates threatening us like a phantom inhabiting in our lives.

This situation becomes very clear when Mayamma reveals through her apparitional powers that the driver’s wife is no simple woman but of higher order and of walauwwa blood. She clichés this by referring to Jayani’s dynastic origins and how she went by

as an orphan as a result she had been driven away with her parents by a torrential flood when she was small. She demonstrates to Janani that she was an inmate of the waluwwa ancestors. She does this by means of a see-through frame and a portrait that she brings from inside. See-through frame signifies a mirror where Janani can see herself, and the portrait, a photograph to show its similarity with her. This is a superb directorial technical devise that Herath entwines in the play to bring out a fine dramatic situation. Mayamma having assumed as a guardian of power ancestry decides that Janani cannot be Janak’s wife, and designs for her to stay away from him. Nor does she want Janani to bear a child by him as he is a driver, a commoner, a person of lower sect and rank. Janani is of dynastic order she establishes and convinces. So a pregnancy is created through spiritual powers separating Janak, the driver from her. Here Janani when Janak appears regrets the emotional circumstances. She moves into the walauwwa, Janak into darkness joining the bats.

Herath makes us to believe that this spiritual power signifies the nature of unchangeable order of the existing power mechanism, and how it haunts like phantoms over us culturally, religiously and politically as a whole in the social milieu that we dabble. So is the presence of Mayamma a symbolic representation of a power agent(s) and puppeteer(s) that hangs around the power house, meaning the rulers, for what, is obvious; and that she is a perpetuation of slavery of the powered.

Are we like bats that do not see daylight and live in the dark in a timorous house of phantoms of power? This is what I believe Hearth propounds and drives us to ask ourselves.

Kalukumari is a highly disciplined production with an appealing and symbolically created a stage set, visually pleasing costumes, and dramatically lighting executions with a high degree of acting though I may not agree with some casting except for Ferni Roshini. (That’s a personal preference, to which others may disagree.) On the day I witnessed the play there was a slight slowness during the first part which I trust can be remedied easily with correct timing.

The play is so symbolic. It may give the impression to the audience during the course of the performance that the play is complicated and disturbing. But at the end the audience will certainly be happy and enjoy that its message is clear, and it’s rich theatre.

- Namel Weeramuni