By Uditha Devapriya
Yashoda Wimaladharma exudes a formidable presence. One of the finest actresses from her generation, she may be the most selective. This is what pushes her, what motivates her, and what makes her tick. It is also what gets her into character.
When I met her for the first time six years ago, it was as if I had walked into one of her sets. In life as in art, she tends to transition between roles. It takes some time for her to assume herself, but when she does, she opens up and willingly lets herself out.
Halfway into our conversation, the faintest smile lit up her face. As her eyes widened, she seemed at ease. Then she leapt into the past, letting the memories overwhelm her. The frown subsided, the icy stare cooled down, and the words flowed. The wall she had placed in front of me cracked open. She was in character, though only barely.
The smile flickered even more. By now, she’d almost broken through.
But then the icy stare returned, the eyebrows furrowed, and the smile subsided. In their place was an enigmatic frown. Something in the past refused to come into recollection. As she ran through the corridors of her memory, she twitched, almost apologetically. Then tea came and we halted our conversation. Soon she regained her old self.
“It’s fascinating,” she remarked all of a sudden. “To forget yourself.”
This, in its own way, is what epitomises Yashoda: Her ability to forget herself. Whatever role she takes up – and she hasn’t taken up many, not unlike that other exceptional actress from before her time, Swarna Mallawarachchi – she has blended into the performance. There is a primeval sense of naturalism that creeps up in her acting. Unlike many actresses, even from her time, she considers acting more as a serious profession than as a passing interest. To me this is what explains the commitment she puts into whatever she gets.
Ever since 1986, when her uncle had her onboard a television series, and 1990, when her uncle cast her as a main character in a play which won for her the Best Actress Award at that year’s State Drama Festival, Yashoda Wimaladharma has consistently tested herself, defied herself, and surpassed herself. Part of that exercise has involved letting her real self go. “I don’t go for every script that comes my way, and I admit I like being selective. But I do make sure that the ones which come my way push me beyond my limits.”
It hadn’t been easy at the beginning. Though Yashoda wasn’t born with a silver spoon, she was far, far from the first in her family to foray into the performing arts. Her father, Ravilal Wimaladharma, had been Professor of Hindi at Kelaniya University, and had engaged with poetry, music, and the media; he had later launched a Hindi service in the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) to cater to Indian listeners. Her mother had been a teacher of dance.
More importantly, her uncle, Bandula Vithanage, had been a respected playwright, director, and actor. “I owe it to him for encouraging me,” she remembered. “I hadn’t even completed my Ordinary Levels (O/Ls) when he put me in front of a camera.”
At St. Paul’s Girls’ School – Milagiriya, where she did her Advanced Levels (A/Ls), the atmosphere had been quite friendly. “Many of my teachers, and all of my friends, went out of their way to help me.” Excelling in her favourite subject, literature, she pursued her education at Kelaniya. “My campus life wasn’t rosy,” she admitted. “Ragging of the violent, demeaning sort had become the norm then. But I didn’t let that hinder me.” Much later in life, she would vocally come out against the ragging and abuse culture so entrenched in local universities.
Right after her A/Ls, Vithanage had chosen her as Emily in Hiru Dahasa, an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Given that she came to theatre through television, she found the new medium a tough challenge. “There were issues from day one. For instance, I found I couldn’t project my voice loudly enough. We had to spend six months rehearsing and I had to tone up during that time.” Fortunately, her efforts paid off at the end.
“Not only was there a standing ovation, but when we went to the State Drama Festival, I had all these thespians meeting and gathering around me. They told me I deserved the Best Actress prize. Newcomers came very rarely to the stage those days. When people saw me they were enthralled. Once I got that experience, theatre became a more fascinating place for me. Why? Because you’re hanging on to the moment, sustaining the audience’s interest without condescending or pandering to them. Up there you have no retakes and you get no breaks. You need to give your best performance, throughout.”
Yashoda told me that for an actress, any actress, living one’s role is the most difficult and yet most essential part of the job. “That’s why, when I played Emily’s role in Hiru Dahasa, I felt I had to learn about this subject. I wanted to straddle campus life with acting.”
The problem was that there hadn’t been any acting schools at the time. “Even now we don’t have teachers for the subject.” In the 1970s, the peak decade for cinema and theatre in Sri Lanka, Salamon Fonseka and Shelton Payagala set up places which passed for such schools. But Fonseka later tragically fell into obscurity, while Payagala would die young.
By the time Yashoda came of age onstage, there remained only one professional well versed in the subject who could instruct her. That was Jayantha Chandrasiri. Realising her potential, Yashoda’s father eventually took her to meet him.
Her training took some years. It hadn’t been difficult. By nature a voracious reader, she had collected as many books as she could on the subject. While technique isn’t the be-all and end-all of acting, she had nevertheless educated herself on different acting styles.
She remembered being particularly fascinated by the Method, the most misinterpreted style of acting the world has ever known. “The Method is a way of getting into the skins of your characters. That appealed to me, since I wanted to know how one could forget oneself, to create the illusion of being another person.” Being an exponent of the technique, Jayantha Chandrasiri had only too willingly taught it to her.
Surprisingly for someone who went through all this because of the theatre, Yashoda hasn’t been in many plays. Four productions over 30 years hardly amount to much, after all. Once she was done with Hiru Dahasa, she took part in Venisiye Velenda, Trojan Kanthawo, and Makarakshaya. The latter two, both by Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, go on record as two of the finest contemporary political dramas this country has ever seen.
She has been much more prodigious in film, though even there she’s been spare in her choices. Her first role was in an Indian film: 1992’s Acharyan (1). Next was Vijaya Dharma Sri’s Guru Gedara, in 1993. Her first major performance came two years later, in Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Maruthaya. She had turned 25.
Among her most recent works, Samanala Sandhwaniya stands out well. “Jayantha Aiya posed a unique challenge when he took me onboard that film. When he gave me the script, he told me to finish all my other work and come back with a fresh mind.”
While she had brought her preconceived notions about acting to almost all her roles, Jayantha asked her to approach it as a newcomer here. “Basically, what he wanted from me was this: When I come on screen, you don’t see me, you see Punya, my character. This was a big enough challenge, but one I met and loved meeting.”
She may not admit it, but Yashoda often relishes in pushing her co-stars. In Samanala Sandhwaniya, for instance, she appears in fleeting glimpses, but she becomes an object of fascination for the hero, who pursues her and makes her the object of his life.
She comes out into the open more prominently in Vaishnavi, where the protagonist, a puppeteer, pours everything he idealised about the girl who he intended to marry, but who instead jilted him, into a work of art. When that work magically comes alive, it almost seems like the setup for a Pygmalionesque comedy. But then she turns the table on everyone, even on the hero, questioning his right to console himself over his failed romance at her expense. For all its flaws, there is a fascinatingly subliminal feminist message in Sumitra Peries’s most recent work, and at the heart of its story, Yashoda epitomises it well.
Remarkable as her acting may be, what is more remarkable is her ability to weed out all emotion, rhetoric, and artifice from it. In a country where actresses are typically judged by how well they cry and weep, Yashoda has proved to be the healthy exception. This may be why she seems so formidable and resilient: Not only because she gives out her performance, but also, more commendable, because she restrains it.
Reference
- Sri Laankeeya Cinamaa Wanshaya, Nuwan Nayanjith Kumara, Sarasavi, 2005