Reflecting on Cyril wickramage

By Uditha Devapriya

\Although the Colombo Film Society would become Asia’s oldest such group, Colombo lay a world or two away from the rest of Sri Lanka. The urban middle-classes encountered the best of regional and Western cinema before their counterparts in Bombay and Calcutta did, but they remained cut off from a vast multitude who never as much as came across English films. The rural middle-classes, on the other hand, had a somewhat different conception of the cinema. The idea of a film theatre was alien to them: they were familiar with travelling cinemas and drama troupes instead. It was later, when they migrated to Colombo, that they came across the world beyond the Madras studio and the Nurti drama.

Cyril Wickramage hailed from this milieu. Born in Kohilagedara in Kurunegala on January 26, 1932, Wickramage grew up on a diet of Sokari, Nadagam, and Nurti. Kohilagedara lay less than 75 kilometres from Negombo, and drama troupes from there would visit his village, enthralling him and his friends. The villagers grew to love these shows so much that they became the centrepiece of Avurudu festivities: “When April came, we would look forward to yet another Nurti drama.” Although neither he nor his friends wanted to act, they turned these encounters into an integral part of their common experience. Elsewhere in Lellopitiya in Ratnapura, Joe Abeywickrema was indulging in such encounters too.

Like Abeywickrema, Wickramage did not get to see many films in his early years. The closest movie theatre, the Imperial, was in Kurunegala town, and that lay 12 kilometres away from Kohilagedara. Yet he would not infrequently get together with his friends, and sometimes family, and just go there. “Back then we didn’t see many English films. Most of them were in Sinhala or Tamil.” Wickramage was about 15 when the Minerva Players released Kadawunu Poronduwa. He did not readily admit it to me, but perhaps the symbiotic link between the early Sinhala films and Nurti and Nadagam drama appealed to him. In any case, it wasn’t just Sinhala films that he liked: he remembered doting on Jayalalitha also.

Wickramage’s first love was the army. Having flirted with the idea of joining the military, however, he let it go in favour of a career in teaching. Having left school, he enrolled at the Peradeniya Training College for a two-year course. Thereafter he was employed as a teacher at a total of seven schools: they included the Ratmalana Deaf and Blind School and Wesley College in Colombo. These stints not only helped him get deep into a career he had grown to love, they also enabled him to pursue his love for music, drama, and dancing. More than any other institution, it was Wesley that got him thinking about the performing arts. Run by the very able and competent Shelton Wirasinha, Wesley College was seeing its peak years, a veritable flourishing of the arts. Wickramage could not escape this.

Participating in a school play, Wickramage made the acquaintance of Ananda Samarakoon. Samarakoon, whose talents were just as attuned to music as they were to the performing arts, encouraged the young teacher to try his hand at the theatre. While the muse beckoned him on, however, it was the cinema that would officially initiate him to the world of the performing arts. In 1965 Wickramage got his first role, opposite Vijitha Mallika in Kingsley Rajapakse’s Handapane. Though a minor role, it got him much praise from those who knew him. The connections he had set up during these years turned to his advantage when, a few months later, he was contacted by Siri Gunasinghe. Gunasinghe would doubtless have seen the man’s talent for playing introspective characters and he cast him in the role of the tragic protagonist in his first and only film, Sath Samudura, in 1966.

Gunasinghe’s film was a watershed in many ways. As the title implies, Sath Samudura was set in a fishing community. It was not the first Sinhala film to be set in such a milieu: just the previous year Gamini Fonseka and Joe Abeywickrema had enthralled audiences with their performances in Getawarayo, which wound up as the Best Film at that year’s Sarasavi Awards. Yet Sath Samudura was the first Sinhala film to explore realistically, with no artifice or contrivance, the torments and agonies of the country’s fishing community. While far from being a docudrama, the story rang true in ways that other films based in such settings did not. Wickramage’s performance, as with the other performances – Denawaka Hamine’s and Swarna Mallawarachchi’s – helped make the film more authentic.

These were, by all accounts, exhilarating years for the local cinema. The revolution that Lester Peries unleashed through Rekava (1956) was still being felt everywhere, and by everyone. Following him in his wake were an entirely different generation of cineastes, who owed their careers to him but sought to go beyond his vision. Siri Gunasinghe’s film was a landmark in the Sinhala cinema, yet it did not fundamentally question or challenge Lester’s conception of the medium: it too belonged to the humanist-realist mode. During this time, Wickramage associated with three people who would figure in the next stage in the Sri Lankan cinema: Dr Linus Dissanayake, producer of Sath Samudura, Vasantha Obeyesekere, Gunasinghe’s Assistant Director, and Dharmasena Pathiraja.

Dissanayake helped finance and produce Obeyesekere’s debut film, Wes Gaththo, in 1970. Cast as the protagonist, Wickramage revelled in a role he was to typify in the years to come: the uprooted, wayward urban dweller. Five years later he gave one of his best performances in Obeyesekere’s next film, Walmath Wuwo. Cast opposite the likes of Tony Ranasinghe, the film explores the plight of unemployed university graduates, who seek fairer climes and greener pastures and migrate to the city with much expectation, but instead find a life of perpetual drudgery. It depicts rather accurately the hopes, dreams, wishes, the torments and the agonies, of an assertive but frustrated Sinhala rural petty bourgeoisie. Hailing from such a milieu himself, Wickramage gave a remarkably true to life performance: in one scene he performs a Nadagam song, no doubt going back to his childhood years.

Between Wes Gaththo and Walmath Wuwo Wickramage took part in a great many films and made friends with a great many directors, actors, and other crew members. Among those he befriended very closely were Dharmasena Pathiraja and Daya Tennakoon. Through his films, Pathiraja had brought together a group of actors that, while not formally constituting a repertoire, nevertheless became a regular feature of his films. These included Tennakoon as well as Amarasiri Kalansuriya and Vijaya Kumaratunga. Wickramage made friends with them all, and in doing so went on to epitomise the spirit of a new age: as far away from the 1960s as the 1960s had been from the 1950s. The films made during this time were full of rebellion, and the directors who made their mark at this juncture wanted to break free from the limits of the past. No director symbolised this more fittingly than Pathiraja.

Wickramage’s best performance in a Pathiraja film would have to be in Bambaru Avith (1977). The film is an allegory about the intrusion of capitalism into the lives and ways of a fishing community. Wickramage is affianced to Helen, a beautiful fisherman’s daughter played by Malini Fonseka. The protagonist of the story, Victor (Vijaya Kumaratunga) soon becomes infatuated with her. The film does not explain why exactly Wickramage’s character hates Victor so passionately, but the conflict between Victor and the fishing community exacerbates because of Helen’s relationship with these two men.

When television came to Sri Lanka in the late 1970s Wickramage found a very different niche. While on film he had been content in playing a certain role, on television he played diverse characters from different milieux. Sometimes these characters are sympathetic, often they are not. In Ella Langa Walawwa, for instance, it is Wickramage who holds the narrative together as the servant, and in Kadulla he epitomises – through his death – the conflict between the old order and the new in 19th century colonial society. Both these productions were directed by Pathiraja; they would be followed by other serials, the most memorable of which, from this decade at least, would have to be Ananda Abeynayake’s Kande Gedara. Here, in contrast to his earlier roles, he plays a conman who dreams of going up and exhibits one mannerism after another to pass off as respectable.

Over the next few years and decades, Wickramage would mellow gracefully. Though he does not act as much as he used to, his recent performances depict a more empathetic, world-weary, sagacious side to him. His career resembles that of other supporting actors, like Daya Tennakoon, who never became leading men, but who became indispensable parts of the films they starred in. Today, at 91, Wickramage has become an elder statesman in the world of the Sinhala film. Whether or not his due honours have been paid is debatable. That he is deserving of these honours, of course, there is no doubt.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@-gmail.com