Dhamma Jagoda’s Vesmuhunu:

Irangani Serasinghe & Rukmani Devi’s Double-Act

By Laleen Jayamanne

A precious historical document was recently ‘unearthed’ by Ranjit, son of Irangani and Winston Serasinghe. It was a theatre programme for Dhamma Jagoda’s 1960s productions of Vesmuhunu (Masks), an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. I don’t think I am being unduly melodramatic in referring to an ephemeral theatre programme as a ‘precious historical document’. Nor have I made a typo in referring to Jagoda’s ‘productions’, in the plural.

I am grateful to Ranjit Serasinghe for having kindly sent me a copy of this programme. It was indeed a most unusual document because there were details of three different productions of the play, with three different casts, in three different years, all directed by Dhamma Jagoda. And it was bilingual. In 1966, Jagoda’s Vesmuhunu was the only play performed at the Lumbini Theatre Festival, as the winner of the Arts Council’s Drama Competition that year. In that production Roma de Zoysa (a Colombo socialite and daughter of a former Finance Minister), played the main female role of Blanche Dubois the declasse Southern aristocratic lady who had lost her fortunes. In the play, she was presented as a Kandyan lady visiting her sister, who is married to a working-class man played by Dhamma and his own wife Sunethra Jagoda as his wife within the play.

According to the programme, Dhamma restaged Vesmuhunu in 1967 and 1968, in a manner that is worth remembering now, for historical reasons, after all those years. In 1967 the role of the aristocratic lady was played by Rukmani Devi, while in the 1968 production Irangani Serasinghe was chosen for it. Dhamma and Sunethra did not act in this last production, which saw film actors such as Wickrama Bogoda and Sriyani Amerasena join the cast.

Just recently I was reminded of these productions on hearing on Television A. D. Ranjit Kumara (a former editor of the Sarasawiya the weekly film tabloid), speaking of Rukmani Devi’s career. He spoke of Rukmani Devi’s immense sense of gratitude to Dhamma, for having given her the opportunity to perform in a reputable western play for the first time in her long career as a singer, film star and stage actor. He added that she bent down and worshipped Dhamma (a gesture of guru bhakthi), just before going on stage.

While listening to Kumara, I recalled that I had observed both Rukmani Devi and Irangani Serasinghe rehearse Vesmuhunu, but at a later date, perhaps in 1970, during the very early days of the Art Centre Theatre Workshop, which Dhamma directed with the support of Harold Peiris, a trustee of the Lionel Wendt Theatre. In those early days, before the theatre was renovated to house the workshops, Peiris had provided his large open portico with chairs for our theatre studies to be conducted in.

I remember these two actresses rehearsing the play with Dhamma in this very space, and also recall registering the very different timbre and texture of their most unusual, trained voices, as I think others also did. Now, I think that Dhamma was reviving the play he had already directed thrice in the 60s, for the fourth time, in the context of the Theatre Workshop. I left the country not long after and have no memory of a performance outcome, but do remember the workshop being interrupted by the insurrection of April 71. It’s not possible to verify details of a fourth production as Dhamma is long gone and people’s memories have faded away. The only way is for someone to search through the newspaper archives for reviews of the productions. But I wonder if there is sufficient interest to do that kind of arduous archival work, so as to even simply chronicle, at the very least, the 60s theatre. Perhaps, Hague Karunarathne’s Ludowyk Memorial Lecture has already done this, though I haven’t had access to it. If so, then detailed theoretical analyses can be developed by young scholars.

Ranjit Serasinghe mentioned to me that his father’s archive of papers on his parents’ acting careers await digitisation by someone interested in the field. Yet again, I feel that in another country these papers (like those of Siva Sivanandan’s on Lankan cinema), would now be safely in a specialist library accessible for research. Ranjit Kumara’s book on Rukmani Devi might lead the way, but that book too must be a collector’s item now.

Theatre Criticism

The Vesmuhunu programme had many gems. One was a concise but (as always) insightful piece by Regi Siriwardena in English, about the differences between a translation and an adaptation as it applied to Dhamma’s Vesmuhunu and more generally too. He tells us that a good adaptation imaginatively transposes an original context, into a milieu with a local resonance. He added that, in doing this, Dhamma had also improved on the original by deleting its ‘lumbering and creaking obtrusive symbolism’ and its ‘tracks of sentimentality,’ focusing on the human and social conflicts of the original which are its strengths. Knowing the original and Western drama well, Regi was able to make this sharp critical evaluation of how creative Dhamma’s adaptation was, adding that it is one of the few outstanding ones of its time.

The programme also contains a substantial discussion of Dhamma’s theatrical experiment by Vidyodaya academic Tissa Kariyawasam in Sinhala, a brilliant gem in its own right. He says that Dhamma had substantially changed his own version of the written play submitted to the drama competition, in his production for the stage. This observation highlights Dhamma’s theatrical talent as a director in staging emotional states, through physical theatrical action in space.

He makes the important point that the intelligentsia (viyathun), who never thought that Rukmani Devi was a gifted actor, now have the chance to see just how good she is. This evaluation is a profound one, coming from an academic, and he implies that it happened because of Dhamma’s own rare intuitive ability to be able to see it on his own and also act on it so decisively, creating theatre history. Thereby, he enabled Rukmani Devi to excel in a play with considerable cultural capital. Because this programme was made before Irangani’s version of the play was performed, we have no account of her performance and interpretation. But in choosing to have both actors perform the same role for a second time (perhaps in 1970), in close proximity, it’s clear that Dhamma considered both Rukmani Devi and Irangani Serasinghe to be excellent, unique actors, with very different styles of acting. The revealing art photographs in the 1968 program allow us a glimpse of these differences, which I will discuss below.

The quality of Regi and Tissa’s critical writing in the 60s and 70s is exemplary of that period of a bilingual, vibrant theatrical culture in the country, developed by director/writers such as Sarachchandra, Henry Jayasena, Sugathapala de Silva, Gunasena Galappatti, and others. I remember reading the reviews Regi wrote in English in those days and also listening, as a school girl, to the regular radio programme he presented called ‘Arts and Ideas’ which was packed with fascinating information. As a script writer for Lester James Peries and as a multi-lingual translator of poetry from several European languages, including Russian, he was especially interested in the problem of translation and transposition of foreign texts into a local context with its different histories and mores. As he wrote accessibly, and was interested in a philosophy of education, his reviews and talks unfailingly widened our knowledge. So, in this case, he offered T.S. Eliot’s ideas on translation and creative adaptation and also mentioned that Shakespeare and many others adapted pre-existing texts. Thereby making the point that creativity is to be found in the quality of the final product and the craft, no matter what the source.

Another important find in the programme was the existence of an institution called ‘The Young Artistes’ Cultural Organisation’, with Lester James Peries as its advisor, and the names of its members, including Aileen Sarachchandra, Sunethra Jagoda’s mother. We also learn that there was a ‘Drama Advisory Board’, of which Professor Sarachchandra was a member, with Cyril Wickramage as the secretary. This high level of support for Dhamma as a member of the Sarachchandra family would have been of great value to him in those early days. Tisse says that Dhamma’s Vesmuhunu was the only play chosen to be performed subsequently, implying a very high standard expected at the National Drama Festival as well. So, the programme provides a clear sense of a fertile theatrical culture, and also how theatrical institutions were created in the 60s to actively encourage daring theatrical experimentation, open to international trends and practices.

Photographic Documentation of Vesmuhunu

From the programme

There are a handful of black and white photographs of all three productions of Vesmuhunu included in the programme. As what I have is a copy of the original which itself is over fifty years old, the quality of the images is very poor but there are sufficient details there to be able to read the images for signs of the kind of interpretations Rukmani and Irangani brought to presenting their versions of the Kandyan lady, Kumari Uduwela. Of course, what one can do with a few unclear photographs is very limited and would remain as conjectures at best. But I feel I can do this because (though credit is not given), it is more than likely that the photos would have been taken by Ralex Ranasinghe who is credited for décor and costumes. The only exception is with the 1966 production, where while he did the Décor, the costumes were designed by the fashion designer Kirthi Sri Karunaratne who acted in the play and also ran a column on fashion in an English-language daily, in which Roma de Zoysa appeared quite often. So, this debut production of Dhamma’s had an unusual social mix as well.

Ralex Ranasinghe, Tony Ranasinghe’s brother, was a professional photographer, and it’s very likely that he took the photographs of all three productions. The wide shot of Roma de Zoysa shows a slender figure in a Kandyan sari with her hair piled on top in a bun.

The only photograph in the programme of Rukmani Devi is an extreme close-up of her face. It’s an art photograph, in which one half of her face is plunged into darkness, while the other half is lit. Furthermore, the face is angled in such a way that her head is slightly bent and she looks up with one eye; a veiled gaze. The expression of that eye is strong, and seductive. It’s the kind of gaze associated with what the French call a femme-fatale, the fatal woman who, according to her mythical attributes, will bring ruin to men through her mysterious sexuality. Rukmani’s dark eye make-up highlights this stylised framing of her face and the suggestion of mystery. She presents a familiar type in Western literature, film and image culture. Hollywood made a special genre of film, the Film Noir, with the femme-fatale as the main attraction and there were stars who were associated with playing that kind of role. Feminist film theorists have researched the long history of this seductive but destructive mythical female archetype, locating her within Western patriarchal narratives, including Eve who tempted Adam with an apple given to her by a devilish snake, leading to their expulsion from Paradise, according to the Bible.

In contrast to this seductive gaze of Rukmani’s, Irangani is shown in full size, smiling openly, dressed in white and dark Kandyan saris, with her hair unusually short falling to her shoulders. Her gestures are theatrically exuberant and outward looking. The feeling she projects is that of a light and airy creature. Though there is one of her looking very serious and troubled, seated at a table with her sister. But one can conjecture that Rukmani presented a dark and mysterious woman, while Irangani was mostly light and airy and fragile in her duplicity. That’s as far as one can go visually analysing and imagining with a few images. But the shot of Sunethra is altogether different, she is the realist figure, contained and constrained in her working-class environment by her husband, and in her role as pregnant wife.

So, the three women have very different characters and functions and acting styles, it would appear. I believe that Ralex Ranasinghe has captured these differences perceptively. Having also done the décor and costumes he would have had a very intimate, subtle knowledge of the texture of the image, materials, light and of the feelings they evoked.

Ralex Ranasinghe, as a professional photographer, had no doubt also seen some of Rukmani Devi’s star portraits of the 50s, at the height of her stardom. There are one or two black & white close-up studio photographs of her as a star, where she does not smile, and her eyes show a dark, languorous, mysterious quality, an eroticism, such as I have not seen in any other Lankan star photograph. In this, she is rather like Ava Gardner, a famous Hollywood femme fatale. I think, the artfully noirish close-up of Rukmani Devi in the program must have been done in a studio, where Ralex Ranasinghe would have been able to control light and shadow with precision, to plunge one half of Rukmani Devi’s face into a dark void. It’s a remarkable and rare film noir image, capturing a rarely seen emotional register, on the face of that incomparable star of the Sinhala cinema. A vesmuhuna like the dark side of the moon, one might say.

Imagine if some curious scholar did unearth the reviews of all the performances, what a treasure trove they would reveal to us about Dhamma Jagoda, Rukmani Devi and Irangani Serasinghe, in their unique visionary and, yes, daring collaboration in Vesmuhunu!

Tennessee Williams’ striking title, A Streetcar Named Desire, was based on an actual street car (bus), in New Orleans, leading to a suburb called Desire.

But ‘A Bus Named Desire’ would have been farcical. The Southern milieu was the racially mixed French quarter with Blues music in the background, heard between scene changes in the first production on Broadway, with Marlon Brando in the main role. Williams mixes the realist title with a poetic register, in the heady mix of sexual violence, class-based powerplay and fantasy.

Dhamma (from the Southern town of Hikkaduwa) would have grown up with a familiarity with masks and ritual performances indigenous to that area. So, when he also chose a poetic title, Vesmuhunu (Masks) for his adaptation, he is playing with many reverberations, including the idea of social masks. In so doing he appears to be able to widen the formal possibilities of realist drama of the ‘lower depths,’ by also presenting ‘social types’, which in their abstraction, are mask-like. For this kind of experimentation, with different types of characterisation and ideas of character, and different registers of acting for each, Dhamma needed experienced actors with great reserves of talent, precise training, a depth of experience, and a desire to take risks, all of which he found in Rukmani Devi and Irangani Serasinghe at the height of their maturity.

It is around this time that Dhamma also produced Dharmasena Pathiraja’s brilliant one act absurdist play, Kora saha Andaya (The Lame man and the Blind) in a sparse, minimalist staging of remarkable intensity. It appears that Dhamma directed this play after he had returned from a research trip to both Britain and the Lee Strasberg Actors’ Studio in New York, to observe different theatrical traditions. Through their collaboration, Pathiraja and Dhamma created two mutually dependent human and social types, a blind man and a lame man. One carrying the other on his shoulder, the other leading the way, binding them into one composite figure, seeking a promised land in an existential void. The long wooden pole which supported them was the only prop, used in unimaginable ways, also to produce sounds on a bare wooden stage, sculpted with light, on which Wimal Kumar de Costa and Daya Pathirana gave unforgettable performances.

Marlon Brando had trained with Lee Strasberg and is credited with inventing a new, understated, internalised kind of masculine acting: Method Acting. It was Brando’s brutish role of Stanley Kowalski that Dhamma played in his own production of Vesmuhunu. One wonders if Dhamma left any research notes on his trip abroad and if he had seen the film of the play with Brando and Vivien Leigh, screened in Colombo in the early 50s. Despite his electrifying and award-winning performance, Dhamma did choose to focus on directing rather than on becoming Lanka’s answer to Marlon Brando.

This was indeed a lucky choice for the development of Lankan theatre. Dhamma’s foresight as an educator, in developing a Drama Curriculum for the schools, was also a major contribution to Lankan theatre.