Udayasiri Wickramaratne, the director of much talked about play ‘Suddek Oba Amathai’, has once again showed his signature with ‘Rangapaam Iwarai’ (Acting Is Over)—a play of its kind. The whole ‘Rangapaam Iwarai’ is entirely in a set of monologues.
The play is divided into three parts and each of the acts is played by a different actor. Despite these acts do not seem to have any apparent connection with each other, they have a distinct, yet harmonious, effect on the audience at the end of the play.
The first part played by Subuddhi Lakmali starts with her raising many questions, sometimes repetitively, to the audiences such as what characterizes a dream. Her addressing these questions runs this act. Lyrical and sentimental at the start, the answers gradually take a philosophical turn as she associates music and then love with dreams.
She delightfully takes the audience through the act to say the dream is any individual as one possesses the characteristics of a dream. The originality of this act is heightened as it itself is a dream-like sequence that focuses on dreams.
The light-hearted fantasy element in this episode provides an ideal platform to progress to subsequent acts that are characterized by wry humour.
The second act stars Sriyantha Mendis as a dead man in funeral clothes who speaks to the audience on how to distinguish a dead man from the living.
The superb effects convey a sense of fear and dramatic suspense effectively at the beginning of this act before it dissolves into amusement and then to boisterous comedy as the dead man gradually discovers his self-deception through a rigorous process of self analysis that has made him think he is dead. All this was magnificently portrayed by Sriyantha Mendis who even once exploited a sneeze of an audience member to lend the act a highly situational comic effect.
Trite phrases like “dead men should not be scared of, but living men should be,” however, didn’t much contribute to the integrity of this act.
The third and final act featured Kamal Addararachchi playing the sabakolayaa (stage fright/fool). It included a lot of low comedy to poke fun at numerous issues.
The sabakolayaa, with entertaining speech and gestures, caricaturized contemporary politics, economic mismanagement, educational institutions, religious corruption and the media industry and culture. It was indeed a refreshing experience to witness the sabakolayaa on stage.
This act, too, was not without its share of shortcomings as it to a considerable extent only dramatised various current issues and situations as they are, and not with appreciable insight or depth.
All the three acts, however, imparted a sense of originality. They all effectively dealt with ‘lost’ characters looking at the other or fantasy in order to find themselves. Identity, therefore, can be said as the main concentration in the play and this theme was explored using three different characters in different ways.
In this context, the characters’ addressing the audience to connect with and belong to intensified the underlying pathos in the play. Intertextuality was conveniently employed to better explain moods and emotions.
The fantasy element was present more or less in all three acts as well.
The acting all together was commendable and there was not any noticeable lapses in speech and body language.
The props, especially large boards with various human shapes carved out of them, were unique and provided an aura of novelty to the play.
The play commencing nearly after 40 minutes after its scheduled time, though, was a clear disappointment that has to be immediately taken proper care of as a full house audience at Namel Malini Punchi Theater had had an intolerable wait.
‘Rangapaam Iwarai’ shows a lot of promise as many of its defects can be rather easily addressed. The novel techniques the director successfully makes use of in the play has helped it to become a refreshingly experimental piece of theatre.