Jean Arasanayagam: marking Prof. Halpe’s birth anniversary which fell on the 18th of November 2018
Recalling our youthful days as students at the University of Peradeniya, sharing our interests in drama and theatre, music, painting and literature.
The Audition
I await the raising of that curtain to reveal the unfolding
of my carefully contrived drama with its structured
plot unfolding in scene after scene in that progression,
sequential in Act after Act ending in the stunning
shock of denouément and climactic finalé yet so
alien to the true enactments and stark realities of life.
I hold the script in my hands, page after page but where
are the players to mount the stage awaiting my direction
in my imagined playwright role?
Yes, where are they?
I look around me but not a single figure presses close,
those eager acolytes stepping out of a mundane
existence to feel the excitation of assuming alter egos,
no one came forward to be auditioned,
where, where are they, the chosen ones whose voices will
echo and re-echo on the stage, hear the applause
that will sound spontaneously and with praise for
their performance, yes, for their unborn as yet untried
talents, the world is still to witness, crowd the theatre,
wait for the curtain to arise, enter that world.
Now that I think of it, the original script must
Change, adding amendments, clarification moving on
from those first idyllic illusory views of our
lives and times, the roles explore the greater
complexities, the new exposés not merely of those
halcyon days, romantic meanderings, the rendition
of those alien traditions and ways of life,
the linguistics, the plot, the themes, the contemporaneity
that bore significance to our once novice imaginations
our fallow minds, no, there is no finalé to this
play, no mimic entendres, no climactic stark, stunning
revelations, no melodrama only that extension that
leads the audience on as the plot progresses
veering between the well-contrived interplay between
tragedy and comedy in the alternation of dramatic roles
and character metamorphosis and transformation.
My script has changed from its first naïve beginnings,
yet I must now seek new players to fit new roles,
I cannot go in search of that youthful coterie of
players whom I rubbed shoulders with as we
trod the Primrose Path of that theatrical novitiate,
those familiar figures enacting our own personal
unscripted dramas, episode after episode each
player assuming the role assigned to play a
part that they imagine will entrance and grip their
visible or invisible audience that awaits each
stellar performance,
The script perhaps will find new players who will
interpret the roles assigned to the them now that
the plot, the themes have new insights with
a changed view of the world far removed from
the canonical dramatic works of the old world writers.
My script has changed through all these long years,
I need to find new players, new characters to fit
changed roles, the old familiar and the known
are no longer there, their voices silenced by time,
by age, by death, the stage empty,
deserted, the hall, the pit a vast echoless space.
We staged, in that past, enactment after personal
enactment in our personal dramatic life-
sequences, remember how our rehearsals took
place anywhere at any time in those carefree
days, inserting our own words, our own speech
as each scene took shape, and the plot thickened,
the climactic moment reached with its
dramatic finalé,
river banks, mountain tops, solitary cul-
de-sacs, secret enclaves, summer houses in that
Ornamental Park in our idyllic landscapes
of Academia in that forgotten century were
our venues, scraps of conversation, impromptu
utterance, desultory conversations formed our
unwritten dramas, compounded of romantic,
unreal dreams and illusions.
Sometimes our rehearsals were intimate
enactments of our private, personal assignations,
clutched in our hands were those classical
plays of Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Macbeth
or Hamlet, plays in translation or plays in
Elizabethan idiom, we were to later discover that
our passions tallied with those protagonists
that we too underwent those selfsame passions,
loves, hates, betrayals, disillusion, loss and agony
of unreciprocated emotions, left foundering,
stumbling in desert or wilderness, confused,
perplexed, those pillars still stand in the amphitheatre of
our own performances for which no applause or
standing ovations resounded from that invisible
audience, in that outdoor stage, our Colosseum,
our individual Globe Theatre.
The pages of my script flutter and fall from my
hands, page after page carried by a chance
waft of wind but the words remain
ingrained in my mind and the players I
have known, are still alive, their voices
still reverberating with all their youth and
passion, that utterance still remembered,
never to be forgotten.
Peradeniya 1950 and after
………………………………….Jean Arasanayagam
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