EXIT SHYAMON JAYASINGE from a memorable contribution in theatre and life

“November 3, 1956, became a day of history. On that magical night, on the Lionel Wendt stage, Maname was born.” – Shyamon Jayasinghe.

In the photographs here, on the left is Shyamon transformed from a real mortal into a fictional immortal, the Pothe Gura in Ediriwira Sarachchandra’s Maname.

It was a sad gathering, on Thursday, June 8 this month at Bunurong Memorial Park in Melbourne, when his body was offered to the ritual of the flames. What died was his life as husband, father, friend , undergraduate at Peradeniya and servant of the Sri Lanka Administrative Service in its upper rungs.

What will live on for a long time more than his real life is the fiction of Shyamon as the Pothe Gura in Maname. No doubt for over 60 years now, successive actors have become the Maname Pothe Gura. Yet inherited continuity from the original creativity lies underneath the changing individual actor personalities who played the role, because Sarachchandra, over a long 40 years, between 1956 and 1996 directed the play, using Shyamon’s creation of the Pothe Gura. From my understanding, Sarachchandra recognized that Shaymon was a great original creator . As the play grew in the rehearsals process the director saw that the situations and utterances of his rich literary text for the Gura, was but a beginning blueprint from which Shyamon built, through the independent art of the actor.

Having written thus far about Shyamon the actor, I pause, for an uncertainty enters my feelings about why I am moved to write .The actor he was or the friend he was ? I have known Shaymon since the mid 1950s in Peradeniya University. I shifted to Sydney in the early seventies but our contact as friends stayed on for Shyamon too, soon after, gave in to the Australia urge. Though we were as far apart as Sydney and Melbourne the telephone voiced our thoughts and feelings as we traversed theatre, the mundane like politics and of course our old Sri Lanka which did not displace itself. And we met too, at times. The picture above, on the right, is when I flew to Melbourne at his invitation, to join a meeting marking a Sarachchandra birth anniversary. I am behind him, awaiting my speaking turn.

A character in a play is a fiction. A fiction is not a lie. It is a remote way of l(a)ying out the truth. Shyamon, the fiction in Maname and my friend are inseparable in memory. Yes, Shyamom Jayasinghe exits, from both sides of Shakespeare’s metaphor: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances….”

Ernest Macintyre