KB: Farewell to a theatre archeologist

By Saumya Liyanage
saumya.l@vpa.ac.lk 

 “Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.”
Euripides

Popularly known as KB, Kapuru Banda Herath, a talented playwright and theatre director, passed away in the early hours of 29 January 2023. Unlike other celebrities, and popular television stars who update their sardonic profiles on Facebook, KB died at the National Hospital, Colombo. KB’s death did not create any turbulence,or receive state attention.

KB died after a battle with a chronic disease. While he was breathing his last, some people were in the streets demanding the abolition of the draconian tax regime, and the release of student leaders behind bars. But the majority did not know that KB, a playwright and director in modern Sri Lankan theatre, had passed away. They did not know who KB Herath was or what he had written or produced for theatre. The tax issue has led to turmoil with the cost of living rising. The local government polls are around the corner. A few bereaved theatergoers, actors, writers and artists gathered at the funeral parlour, where his remains were kept. KB left the Sinhala Theatre unnoticed.

Academic Intervention

When I received the news about KB’s demise, I was with my students, working for a new musical theatre at the University of Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA) Colombo. KB was one of the visiting lecturers at the Department of Theatre Ballet and Modern Dance, Faculty of Dance and Drama, UVPA, Colombo, where I have been working since 2007. When I was the Head of the Department, I invited KB to visit UVPA and teach scriptwriting, and directing to our undergraduates. KB was among the few playwrights who shared their knowledge with our students. He spent a lot of time and energy with students, guiding them in writing and dramaturgy. KB was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the Visual and Performing Arts, in 2022, recognising his contribution to theatre and television.

I intend to write this essay for two reasons. One is that KB was one of the leading playwrights and directors in the modern Sri Lankan theatre. Secondly, as a writer, he excavated the dominant historical narratives and restructured them to unveil political and social contexts of his time. In this sense, KB was an important writer who reinterpreted some of the popular hegemonic narratives of history, kinships, and family sagas, or dynasty of Sri Lanka, and turned those narratives into powerful political allegories for proscenium theatre.

Text and Meaning

KB Herath started his theatre career with the production, titled Delowaka Kathava, in 1968. Yet, his presence as a playwright and director attracted a wider audience after his play Sudu Karal, in 1979. Hence, KB and his contemporaries are identified by some theatre critics as ‘theatre makers of the 1970s.’ KB has been bracketed with his peers such as Simon Navagaththegama, Hemasiri Liyanage, Vijitha Gunaratne, Gamini Haththotuwegama, Bandula Withanage, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, Parakrama Niriella and others. Many of these playwrights actively engaged in theatre making in that era. 1971 saw the first JVP uprising to topple the second Bandaranaike’s government and it was crushed with Indian support (DeVotta, 2007). It is observed that most of the ’70s playwrights were believers in social transformation through arts. They and directors were also inspired by the revolutionary changes taking place in Latin America and elsewhere. Hence, the theatre makers in the ’70s, employed their theatre practice in favour of social change, and KB was among them. They were of the view that theatre was a powerful tool to influence people’s minds and shape their thinking, but that should be done through artistic means. They, save a few, rejected the propagandist practice of theatre and tried to find ways and means of doing it with aesthetically refined ways. Therefore, KB believed that good theatre consisted in the aesthetically refined play script and its literal sublimity.

KB and his contemporaries used chronicles of Sri Lankan history and folklore to develop their political parables on stage. In a way, that was reminiscent of what Sarachchandra did in 1956 to find ‘Sinhala theatre’ and its ‘indigenous identity.’ Sarachchandra used the Mahavamsa chronicle to write his plays and touched upon some of the relevant and uniform themes of human life of his time. Similarly, playwrights in the ’70s also used folklore and other chronicles to dramatise the politically-charged and socially relevant themes of the ’70s. When Sarachcahandra did so with his own aesthetics to find a uniform theatre for the Sinhala speaking masses, ’70s playwrights wanted to do it through their socialist realism derived from their Marxist ideology. KB chose the same path, exploring Sinhala chronicles to narrate contemporary socio-political realities. Many of his plays such as Dona Katharina (1995), Deveni Mahinda (1998) and Vāsudewa (1999) are based on such narratives retold in theatrical excellence to depict his own people and time. Similar to his predecessors of theatre of revolt in the ’70s, KB saw theatre as a medium to communicate political ideologies by reinterpreting and staging historical narratives. For him, theatre was an ideological transaction or a community action (Kershaw, 2002) between the playwright and the audience.

However, KB lived in an era when the theatre was fully understood as a matter of text, which played a key role in theatrical representation.

When Sarachchandra propagated modern Sinhala theatre as an ‘aesthetic transaction’ between proscenium and the audience member, playwrights and directors in the ’70s, in general, shared some of the co-values that Sarachchandra envisioned in his theatre philosophy. His liberal humanism and Sanskrit aesthetic theories influenced some of the ’70s theatre makers including KB. Writing about KB’s theatre and his ‘theatrical vision’, one writer has said KB was a writer who had a vision filtered through his village life and his heightened artistic ability developed through his education and his contemporaries he has associated with’ (Author translation Chandrasiri, 2003, pp. 237–259).

KB’s theatrical intervention should not be limited to liberal humanistic value systems, and his textual intervention in modern Sri Lankan theatre deserves recognition.

Death of the Author  

KB’s theatre was a text-based theatre, which is again framed within the proscenium arch. His political discourse was based on his historical narratives written and structured in such a way that the dramatic theatre was enhanced through the culmination of the tragic hero.

People visited KB’s theatre not because his theatre is more performative and visually appealing to them but because they grasped aesthetic sentiments through the dialogical structures perceived through the text. This phenomenon has been a dominant element in KB’s plays. His text dominated dramatic action on stage. As stated above, the era when KB started writing plays and producing them for the stage was dominated by literary excellence that resulted from liberal humanism. In this discourse, the text and its characters, dramatic actions, culmination, and resolution were predominant dramatic elements governed through centuries old Aristotelian narratology. KB’s intervention was no exception. His textual narratives were also composed in such a way that the Aristotelian narratives were completed and fulfilled and finally the cathartic experience of the audience was achieved.

KB’s theatre is discussed as a powerful dramatic enactment but has been explored to discuss its logocentric meaning through the textual narratives. For KB, theatre is all about text, which is essential to create socio-political meanings through which his ideological stances could be transferred to the spectator. Writing about his theatre work, Gamini Haththotuwegama once said, “K. B. Herath is a dramatist, who is a grim, macabre, sardonic excavator of unpleasant “truth” about family, marriage, women, religion” (Haththotuwegama, 1998, p. 157). What does Haththotuwegama intend to convey through this statement? As I see, his intention is to point out how KB explored the tragedy of family, women, marriage, and religion, which are the basis of all these social entanglements. Yet, KB stuck to the logo-centric textuality, where the theatre is taking place within his own text instead of stage. KB was a poet, who viewed this theatre as a tapestry of poetic enactment through which his characters and the dramatic action were merely enacted through his text.  The modern Sinhala theatre was doomed when KB shifted from live theatre to television. Although he was still a believer in the domination of text in the theatre practice, this era of text and the dramatic theatre was overridden by the postdramatic theatre in the world. I never heard theatre makers or playwrights of his generation discuss the paradigmatic changes taking place over the past five decades in theatre and performance studies in many countries including those in Asia, Australasia, the UK and the US. KB still stuck to his text-based theatre which gave the pleasure and salvation in his literary kingdom, as it were. During the past few decades, ‘the performative turn of the arts’ has marked the significant rupture of the traditional notion of literature, playwriting and theatre. The artistes and their work of art have become more performative than ever before. Literary text evolved into hyper-text. Rather than reading on paper, poetry recitals and readings came to be performed. Bodies of actors and dancers ceased to be space where the playwright’s ideas and thoughts were projected or conveyed through symbols. The performer’s body itself has become a text, elevating its inherent subjugation to the literary text. KB must have been aware of such paradigmatic changes happening in the post-democratic, post-dramatic era of the world. Yet, he seemed to stick to his own passion of the authorship and the meaning maker of his own text while aligning himself with his predecessors of Sri Lankan modern theatre.

Conclusion

KB’s contribution to Sri Lanka’s modern theatre and, especially text-based theatre, is immense and he explored uncanny elements of the so-called Sinhala dynasty and revealed unpleasant tragedies of men and women whose lives have been more or less hidden in the popular histories. During his last years, KB worked as a writer for other media including soap-operas, developing episodic stories to entertain the masses. However, due to his involvement in television and writing teledramas, much of his creative energy was drawn into popular narratives and shallow entertainment. Yet, KB was a playwright who brought tragic elements to Sinhala speaking modern theatre. He believed theatre to be a forceful medium to change people’s destinies. He directed his artistic virtuosity to create theatre on stage and made his audience empathise with his protagonists and experience the catharsis at the end. But as Hans-Thies Lehman asserts, ‘Dramatic theatre ends when these elements are no longer the regulating principle but merely one possible variant of theatrical art’ (Lehmann 2006, p. 22).

References

Chandrasiri, B. (Ed.). (2003). Dramatists in the ’70s (9th ed., pp. 237–259). Department of Cultural Affairs. (Original work published)

DeVotta, N. (2007). Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ideology: implications for politics and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center Washington

Haththotuwegama, G. (1998). Unresolved Contradictions Paradoxical Discourse and Alternative Strategies in the Post-Colonial Sinhala Theatre. In R. Abeypala, A. Vickramasighe, & V. Pathiraja (Eds.), Abhinaya (pp. 130–169). Sethsiripaya, Baththaramulla: Sinhala Drama Panel, Ministry of Cultural Affairs.

Kershaw, B. (2002). The Politics of Performance. Routledge.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. (2006). Postdramatic theatre. London; New York: Routledge.

 (The writer is Professor in Drama and Theatre at the Department of Theatre Ballet and Modern Dance, Faculty of Dance and Drama, University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo.)