This is the second part of an essay from the writer’s remarks at a speech delivered at the Kolamba Kamatha Festival on 28 March
To understand this phenomenon more clearly, I think we need to reflect on the trajectory of modernism in Sri Lanka. In early 20th century Ceylon, ideas of modernism and modernity were disseminated by a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals.
Most of them hailed from a Westernised elite. They included Lionel Wendt, Harry Pieris, George Keyt, Justin Deraniyagala, and Aubrey Collette. By dint of their wealth and agency, these men were able to transmit new ideas to the country.
However, they were circumscribed by a lack of proficiency in Sinhala and Tamil. For instance, Pieris, the modernist painter who led the 43 Group following the death of Wendt in 1944, once wrote that he wished he knew Sinhala well.
“What a lot of good I could have done in my field of work.”
Of course, this was more than a problem of language proficiency. But it explains why the revolt in the Sinhala theatre had to pass two junctions instead of one.
Notwithstanding their lack of fluency in Sinhala, the modernist painters of Sri Lanka, including Pieris, Keyt, and Collette, had the luxury of falling back on a medium that did not require much fluency in language. As a result, they were able to convey their innermost thoughts about the world they inhabited, both to their countrymen and to foreign audiences.
For this reason, the modernist revolution in painting came earlier than in other art forms. In theatre, by contrast, the language gulf was very much present, and it needed to be resolved before questions of theme and experience could be addressed.
Sinhala theatre’s modernist garb
By the 1940s one could discern two divergent paths in Sri Lankan theatre.
The first was dominated by nurthi, nadagam, and other ‘hybrid’ theatrical forms that had become a part of everyday life in the cities, including Colombo. These plays were patronised by the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie. The second was the English theatre, which covered productions of British and European plays. They included E.F.C. Ludowyk’s adaptations of ‘Antigone,’ ‘The Good Woman of Setzuan,’ and ‘The Insect Play’.
My argument is that Ediriweera Sarachchandra managed to bring these two streams together. I am of course not suggesting that he reconciled the nurthi to Ludowyk’s English dramas, because he didn’t. What he did, with ‘Maname,’ was to cloak Sinhala theatre in a modernist garb.
It is easy to understand why many praised him for pioneering authentic Sinhala theatre, but in reality, he was putting together a range of dramatic styles. He also broke with precedent by adapting, not a Western play as his colleagues had done, but rather a Buddhist parable. This was modernism incarnate: the past cohabiting with the present.
However, while the stylised form that Sarachchandra pioneered had its strengths, one of which was its wide appeal and its consonance with Sinhala cultural revival, it was also constricted by a few weaknesses.
For one thing, it lent itself too easily to imitation. Within a few years of praising ‘Maname,’ hence, Regi Siriwardena could write: “Why, oh why, must the playwrights of this school turn only to legend and folktale for their materials? I am afraid that with a continued diet of this kind, Sinhala drama will die from lack of contact with contemporary life… The playwrights who have followed Dr. Sarachchandra seem to have been far more concerned with form than with content.”
In another essay, written around the same time, Siriwardena argued that the departure of Ludowyk rang a death knell for English theatre in the country, adding that with the rise of a bilingual class of artistes and audiences, it had been rendered somewhat obsolete. In the same vein, he implied that the popularity of Sarachchandra’s dramas paradoxically made the very forms and structures on which they were based outdated.
Siriwardena’s contention was not that stylised drama had no place in contemporary life, but that it needed to be reinvented and made more relevant. He brought up dramatists like Bertolt Brecht and Brendan Behan, who in their countries – Germany and Ireland – had used opera and musical theatre as “an instrument of social comment or satire”.
Clearly, Siriwardena was calling for a fusion of stylisation and naturalism which he felt would achieve mass appeal and social relevance. Yet was this combination possible in the context of the changes sweeping across Sri Lanka?
A clash of vision
To a considerable extent, that question would be resolved not by Sarachchandra, but by the playwrights who succeeded him and opposed him. It is at this point that we should turn to Sugathapala de Silva and the Angry Young Men of his time.
I want to digress here to an anecdote. Although I never met Sugathapala – I was nine years old when he passed away in 2002 – I did meet several artists who knew him, associated with him, and often worked with him. Among these was the writer Premaranjith Tilakaratne.
Premaranjith passed away in 2017. I first met him two years earlier. I recall having several conversations with him, physically and over the phone. In one of them, he recounted to me a confrontation he once had with Sarachchandra.
A lover of American cinema, Premaranjith had watched and admired Robert Wise’s great Oscar-winning musical film, ‘West Side Story’. Around six years after its release in 1961, he would translate and adapt it himself, as ‘Kontare’.
The music in it had stirred him, and he wanted to impress Sarachchandra. Seeking a meeting with him, he confidently played one song after another on his record player. When the record was finished, he looked towards the guru, perhaps expecting a positive response.
But Sarachchandra was put off. He was not smiling, he was frowning.
“What did you think?” Premaranjith asked him.
Sarachchandra paused for a while before replying.
“It is nothing but cacophony!” he said, dismissively.
At one level, this was a clash of vision. Though the two of them continued to interact, Premaranjith remained critical of Sarachchandra’s views. In a way, the confrontation reflected a chasm between established cultural forms and the newer forms that the likes of Premaranjith, Ranjith Dharmakeerthi, and Sugathapala de Silva pioneered.
Critic Ajith Samaranayake has pointed out two reasons for this. The first was a gradual disintegration of society and of class barriers. In 1960s Sri Lanka, this was felt discernibly through the migration of bilingual youth from the village to Colombo.
To cite Samaranayake, it was a generation who “had come to Colombo in search of the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow”. Such shifts reflected a breakdown of the class barriers and social codes that had governed colonial society. In the 1950s, not surprisingly, there was a rise in the number of undergraduates at the University of Ceylon. The shift to Sinhala and Tamil at schools and universities contributed to this growth.
The second reason was new developments in Western theatre, cinema, art, and literature, which were becoming increasingly accessible to Sinhala and bilingual social milieus. Whereas modernist artists like Wendt had once transmitted new ideas, these ideas had now come within the reach of other groups.
That was partly because of cultural institutions, including foreign missions. Places like the British Council held regular screenings of films and had access to the latest art and culture magazines. The new generation of artists made use of these opportunities to broaden their horizons.
Sugathapala and his contemporaries
It is against this backdrop that Sugathapala de Silva should be viewed and celebrated. The agent provocateur of Sinhala theatre, he represented the peak of the rebellion that dominated Sinhala theatre in the 1960s. Samaranayake describes him as a member of a class of self-reliant, self-supporting artistes who later went extinct in the country.
To be sure, Sugathapala’s contributions, as a playwright, novelist, translator, journalist, critic, and commentator, have been written about by those more qualified than I. What I will thus do when wrapping up my speech is to examine what brought him and his peers together, in the context of his group, Ape Kattiya, and their contribution.
I note five factors which distinguished Sugathapala and his contemporaries. The first is the class composition of these playwrights and artists. Most belonged to a Sinhala lower middle class, and many of them hailed from villages outside Colombo. Sugathapala himself, for instance, came from Nawalapitiya, while Premaranjith came from Ratnapura, Sumana Aloka Bandara from Kurunegala, and Henry Jayasena from Gampaha.
The second point is that, at least in the 1960s, these artists experimented with existential themes, informed by their readings of Sartre and Albert Camus. It was only towards the 1970s that they became more oriented to politics. While plays like Jayasena’s ‘Apata Puthe Magak Nathe’ predicted this shift in as early as 1968, the peak of that trend was Sugathapala’s ‘Dunna Dunu Gamuwe,’ first staged in 1972.
The third point is that there were sustained exchanges between these artists. There were collaborations between them. In the same vein, there was a healthy, constructive rivalry and competition. Many of these artists hobnobbed with Sugathapala, yet later they began their own troupes. Premaranjith Tilakaratne, for instance, founded 63 Kandayama, Sumana Aloka Bandara founded S Thuna Kandayama, and G.D.L. Perera Kala Pela.
Of the lot, it was Premaranjith who disagreed most visibly with the trajectory of the Sinhala theatre of Sugathapala and his colleagues. Thus, while the latter embraced political themes after the 1960s, Premaranjith went for adaptations with European tragedies and American musicals: ‘Thoththa Baba,’ an adaptation of Joe Orton’s ‘Entertaining Mr Slone,’ ‘Kontare,’ based on ‘West Side Story,’ and ‘Julie,’ based on August Strindberg’s play.
It is interesting that in his last play, Premaranjith returned literally and metaphorically to the Tower Hall with a revival of the nurthi tragedy ‘Sri Wickrama’. This was the kind of theatre which both Sarachchandra and his intellectual descendants had so vigorously opposed. Premaranjith’s swansong courted some controversy, but it proved that these playwrights, united as they were in one sense, differed greatly in another.
The fourth point is that these dramatists were ably helped by a tremendously talented pool of actors who in turn carved out independent careers, not just in theatre but also cinema. The most obvious name that comes to mind is, of course, Tony Ranasinghe.
Both Tony and his brother Ralex were prominent members of Ape Kattiya, and it was from the Ape Kattiya acting cohort that Lester James Peries got several leading cast members aboard films like ‘Gamperaliya,’ ‘Delovak Athara,’ ‘Ran Salu,’ and ‘Golu Hadawatha’. They included not just Tony, but also Wickrama Bogoda, G.W. Surendra, and Anula Karunathilaka.
The fifth and, in my view, most important point has to do with the question I raised at the beginning: essentially, whether it was possible in Sri Lanka to synthesise the stylised drama of Sarachchandra with the naturalistic dialogues-driven drama of his successors.
Between the one and the other, there had been attempts, including by Dayananda Gunawardena with ‘Nari Bena’ and his brilliant adaptation of ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ ‘Bak Maha Akunu’. Henry Jayasena’s ‘Kuweni’ is another oft-cited example, though his ‘Janelaya,’ which he described as an experiment, tried on a larger scale to combine these two genres.
Towards a new Sinhala theatre
Perhaps I am being diplomatic if I say that Sugathapala de Silva, and Ape Kattiya, did not fully resolve the issue of whether a reconciliation of these two genres was possible. But then that is an open-ended question. In any case, the Sinhala theatre today, whether at the Lumbini, Elphinstone, or even Lionel Wendt, has answered this question positively: there are enough and more plays in which stylised elements cohabit with naturalist elements.
Whether Sugathapala himself thought this synthesis was possible is left to be seen. My own contention is that his personal experiences, as a young man of the 1950s, who grew up to the 1960s and saw the tumultuous politics of that decade and the 1970s, along with the onset of civil war and insurrection in the 1980s and 1990s, convinced him that naturalist, dialogues-driven, and highly charged theatrical forms was not just a way forward, but the only way forward.
I believe that at one level, this made him cynical about older artistic forms. In his foreword to the first edition of ‘Dunna Dunu Gamuwe,’ written in the aftermath of the 1971 insurrection, for instance, he raised a question.
“Can we bring drama to the people only by following old traditions? Some people wrongly believe that to fill theatre halls, new plays should be created only from what is left of old forms like bali, kolam, sokari, and nadagam. But this is just another attempt to make people forget the reality of their lives and take them into a world of fantasy.”
This is not to say that Sugathapala abandoned every traditional element in Sinhala art and literature. It is interesting that ‘Dunna Dunu Gamuwe’ itself begins with a modification of a folk song, rewritten to suit the story’s political and satirical overtones.
ඉන්නේ දුම්බරයි මහ කළු ගලක් යට
කන්නෙත් කරවලයි රට හාලේ බතට
බොන්නෙත් බොරදියයි පූරුවෙ කළ පවට
යන්නේ කවදා ද මව්පියො දකින්නට
Sugathapala renders this plaintive song thus:
ඉන්නෙත් කොම්පැනියෙ කළු ගල් හිතක් යට
කන්නෙත් කරවලයි රට හාලේ බතට
බොන්නෙත් බොරදියයි ලබුගම හතර වට
යන්නේ කවදාද ගැලැවී රැහැන් පොට
What this indicates is that Sugathapala de Silva did not dismiss the possibility of a fusion between the old and the new. Rather, he felt the old had outdated the new and become irrelevant. He believed that cultural forms that were unnecessary in our wider struggles for justice belonged, to quote Leon Trotsky, in the dustbins of history.
This did not mean that he discarded the past; merely that he preferred cultural elements which would resonate with the present and the future. He felt that older artistic elements needed to be reconfigured for them to become relevant to the struggles of our time. It is this which, more than anything, epitomises Sugathapala de Silva’s views of the medium he made his own. I will end by saying that, in making that medium his, he made it ours too.
(The writer is an independent researcher, author, columnist, and analyst whose work spans international relations, history, anthropology, and politics. He holds an LLB from the University of London and a Postgraduate Diploma in International Relations from the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies [BCIS]. In 2024, he was a participant in the International Visitor Leadership Program [IVLP] conducted by the US State Department. From 2022 to 2025, he served as Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific-focused foreign policy think tank. In 2025, he did two lecture stints in India, one as a Resident Fellow at the Kautilya School of Public Policy in Hyderabad and another on art and culture at the India International Centre in New Delhi. Since 2023, he has authored books on Sri Lankan institutions and public figures while pursuing research projects spanning art, culture, history, and geopolitics. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)