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Book Review : by Thiru Kandiah

In the early 'eighties, Ernest MacIntyre went away to Australia. And with that, the well-springs of creativity which would nurture the Lankan tradition of original, post-colonial English theatre that he originated seemed to me to dry up. About two decades later, in the year 2000, I happened to see Ruwanthie de Chickera's production of her play Two Times Two is Two. Suddenly the despondency lifted and there was this strong surge of hope. At last, it appeared, the English theatre in the island had found its successor to MacIntyre.

As usual, though, a few days of reflection began to raise some destabilising questions in my mind. In terms of form and technique, de Chickera's achievement in the play was, no doubt, very striking. The unhurried re-enactment on stage of exactly the same scene which had been played out just minutes before, with the one difference that it now had a "filled out" dialogue, did more than simply surprise the audience into alertness. It also represented an innovative exploitation of the resources of the stage to concretely dramatise the play's theme of non-communication - which is another way of saying also that the mesh between form and content was impeccable.

But it was the content and associated matters that raised the queries.

There was a decided sense of some of those abstract, universal human themes, much loved of old-fashioned literary departments, existing in some de-contextualised stage space. Synge had taught us long ago that such themes needed to be firmly rooted in a distinctive time and place if they were to have any chance of being concretised and experienced in the here and now by the audience.

This was important since, as Synge also reminded us, the audience were the essential collaborators in the dramatic event, who participated in its happening and to whom and for whom it spoke. But where, in the play, were the post-colonial people among whom the emerging tradition of theatre was to have its existence and from whom it would draw its sustenance even while sustaining them? In their absence, was the achievement of the play confined mainly to form and technique?

The dangers of such an achievement are not difficult to envisage. This is especially so in current times, when the erstwhile colonising centres have launched on a re-appropriation of their lost colonial spaces through a massive thrust in all areas of life on behalf of mere skills, techniques, verbal and textual pyrotechnics, technology and form.

These, taking on a life and validity of their own, have the effect of inhibiting the creative development of truly local thought and practice on the basis of the materiality of their contexts. Their corollary, as far as an emerging post-colonial drama goes, is demonstrated, for instance, by many of the plays produced in an otherwise lively English theatre in Singapore. Often spectacular in the use of technology of a kind learned from the Centres, there is in them also a preoccupation with themes and content which are determined by those Centres. Inevitably, this was at the cost of sidelining the mass of the people who would, presumably, constitute the larger base of the immediate collaborators in the plays.

The consequence is plays that are merely stagey, not dramatic, clever and impresario, not meaningful and speaking to/for a whole post-colonial people. In a sense, the first of the three plays in Checkpoint, which de Chickera directed about a year ago, exemplifies the problem. Speaking to the smart, young, affluent set who, largely, filled the theatre, this play, not one of de Chickera's own it must be noted, gave no trace of a recognition of the larger populace and context within which this set are inextricably located.

But, even as such doubts crowded on me in the days after I had first seen Two Times Two is Two, other thoughts of an opposite kind began to compete robustly with them. It struck me, for instance, that de Chickera, while not imposing limiting closures on her theme and content and remaining open to their complexities, had had the courage to present them in terms of an affirmation of their universal human meaning. This was itself an act of resistance to the relativism, the ambivalences, the neither-here-nor-thereness that are currently so fashionable.

These unstable postures, challenging such meanings and making it impossible to find out where one stood, have become a major means by which the re-colonising Centres destabilise acts of post-colonial creativity, rendering them uncertain about what they are and what they are trying to do among their people.

This act of resistance by de Chickera was accompanied by another. Many Lankan creative writers in English have sought to earn places for themselves within the emerging canon of post-colonial writing by populating their creations with the paraphernalia of indigeneousness drawn from a cultural space they are not immediately part of - paddy fields, village women, drums, masks, peraheras, thovil ceremonies, poya in the village and many other such things.

As in the case of many indigenisation efforts led by English-speaking people, a lot of this is far from disinterested, and often shamelessly exploitative of the experience of the people whom the creations purportedly speak. It is to de Chickera's credit that, in her attempt to join the stream of post-colonial creativity in this country, she chose to work from out of the context and experience that she could immediately, and with honesty and familiarity and conviction handle - which, I might remark, is not to say that she is condemned to remain entirely within its confines.

All of this was evidence of an artistic and experiential integrity which held out the promise that she had the wherewithal to resist the overpoweringly tempting fashions which could subvert the very act of post-colonial creation, and indicated that the hope I mentioned earlier was justified. Then, just the other day, I was given a copy of the play which launched de Chickera on her way, namely The Middle of Silence (originally The Crutch), with the request that I review it, and forthwith! And, in spite of the sense of deprivation I felt in having to encounter the play not in the life of its performance on stage but in the stillness of the printed page, I found that it gave me the proof that I needed for my hope.

There are many comments I can make on the play that are of the kind that have already copiously been made on it. But let me confine myself simply to those which relate to the themes of post-colonial creativity I have drawn attention to above.

The play is decidedly located in the distinct place and time of the larger body of collaborators in any Lankan drama. No doubt, the issues of poverty, class divisions, prostitution and so on that it deals with are not ones which its innermost group of collaborators, the English-speaking audience, suffer from within their immediate experience.

But, they are an inescapable part of the larger context they occupy, something which the consciousness generated by the nationalist-socialist revolution of the mid-'fifties and after made impossible to ignore. Moreover, at least as people who are, even unwittingly sometimes, culpable in the creation of the system which threw up the issues in the first place, their implication in them is not a matter that they can easily evade. This is something of which de Chickera reminds them through the characters of the lower class heroine, Nandha's, middle class in-laws, Kamini and Ranil.

What is impressive, though, is the originality of the stage idiom through which de Chickera constructs and explores the themes. It is an originality that seems to derive from an instinctive ability to present what seem to be the familiar and the expected, even the stereotypical, and then turn it around with deft creativeness. Thus the searingly painful treatment on stage of Nandha's plight, for instance, shares much with the stereotypically popular responses since the mid-'fifties to issues of poverty, exploitation and so on.

At the same time, there is nothing in it of the simple-minded "aney pau" kind of dripping sentimentality that populist thinking in that mould habitually cloaked that kind of experience in, inhibiting self-reflexivity. Making such sentimentality and non-reflection unlikely is the impact of the massively exaggerated stereotypical images of squalor, violence, brutality, dominance and disempowerment in the play. These are so patently overplayed that we gradually begin to realise that they are part of a purposive mode of stylisation which cannot but have the kind of alienating effect that makes evasion impossible.

Which leads to another interesting observation. Sarachchandra had maintained in his time that stylisation is the mode of artistic expression which came most readily to our people. De Chickera moves easily into this mode which, if Sarachchandra was right, would satisfy her indigenous post-colonial collaborators. But, she does so in her own original way, not by resorting to the ritualistic song-dance routines which have come to be a hallmark of indigenous stylisation, but in the way just remarked on.

A further significant act of artistic resistance to the fashionably expected is exemplified by de Chickera's treatment of certain other major themes which are inextricably woven into the development of the play.

These are the themes of gender, male dominance and female disempowerment, and together with them woman's decisive challenge to the intolerable situation they define. Brutally treated by her down-and-out, paraplegic, middle class husband, Ajith, in spite of her heroic efforts to provide for him, Nandha finally achieves confidence and control of her life by turning to prostitution. Using her sexuality to provide for him in this manner, and, also, in her physical relationship with him, to unnerve him, she secures dominance over her husband, who is reduced to fearing this woman whom he had treated so shamefully. At one level, then, she has won the battle of the genders, reversed the power roles and achieved liberation and self-empowerment.

But, de Chickera does not rest there. Refusing to remain within the superficial limits of battles and victories in their own right, and displaying what appears to be a characteristic concern with the encompassingly human, she looks beyond the immediate features of the gender battle to the larger and very complex human meanings they intrinsically reflect.

Nandha's triumph is not just in the reversal of the pattern of dominance and power, which would, after all, leave the essential human violations intact, it transcends it. The Prologue (which interestingly seems to represent the last point in the actual chronology of the characters' lives) and the last scene (which represents a point in time just before that) contain matter relevant to this claim.

They indicate, for instance, that Ajith's negative attitudes to Nandha have not undergone any significant change. It is only that he is now tormented by more devastating demons than before, as a consequence of his knowledge that his comforts have been bought for him by his wife's earnings as a prostitute. Moreover, Nandha herself sees in her victory a certain kind of loss, even defeat. For, in spite of the confidence and liberation prostitution has brought her, there is no romanticisation of that fact, she explicitly laments the cost it has extorted from her. The playwright herself does not, it must be noted, try to sanitise Nandha's activities by using politically correct euphemisms to re-label them.

Nandha's triumph lies elsewhere, therefore. It is projected on stage in the all-important Prologue and last scene. For all the dominance she assumes within the situation, Nandha does not walk out on Ajith, she returns to give him the cigarette he craves for and remains gentle with him. The cynically wise and generous-spirited prostitute Nirekha says it best, "You are blessed. You can still love".

It is the firmness of de Chickera's sane commitment to the larger scale of such encompassing eternal human themes and values that seems to have enabled her to resist certain unproductive current fashions which might have distorted or even subverted the task of creating a viable post-colonial drama.

These could well have led her into a no-(wo)man's land from out of which she could hardly have created a viable post-colonial drama that would have made a difference to her collaborators.

By successfully resisting them, as demonstrated by the plays discussed above, she seems to indicate that the hope expressed in the opening paragraph above is, indeed, justified.

The book Middle of Silence will be on sale at the Gratiaen Award ceremony tomorrw, 1 June at Gallery 706, Galle Road, Colombo 3.

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