Dangerous beauty

Saturday, 2 August 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

A review of the play ‘Walking Path’ by Stages Theatre Group

There is a saying about the approaches to right behaviour in England France and Russia, which goes something like this – in England, if it is not prohibited it is allowed; in France, even it is prohibited it is allowed; and in Russia, everything is forbidden, even if it is expressly allowed. It is possible to argue that contemporary Sri Lanka has, in its post-independence trajectory, started off with the English model, flirted with the French model and is today heading towards the Russian one. The Stages Theatre Group’s latest production, directed by Jayampathy Guruge, is a superb, fiendishly clever, masterly casual, exploration of the Russian model in Sri Lanka. But it is also an exploration of the universal post-modern condition, the human geography of modern urban civic life, post-war ennui and the insidious encroachment of the military mindset.

A play without words

A word about the form. The director’s note claims it is a play, without words, scripted by Ruwanthie de Chickera. The man on the street might be forgiven for tripping over the semiotics of it all and calling it mime – but it is not that entirely. For instance, it has much of the impressionistic inexactitude of a cartoon that hints at an idea, instead of the magnified clarity of mime. The speechlessness of the ‘play’ is a far cry from pretentious artistic indulgence. It arises naturally as an inevitable necessity that assists the audience and the players to both confront and overcome the well advised self-censorship of the time. It lies at a pleasing convergence point of the aesthetic and the political. Nothing has been said—everything has been communicated. Without the defining, directing and limiting exactitude of words and speech, fragmentary moving images and suggestions tap directly into a stream of consciousness of the audience with a startling compression of meaning. A play without words is also infinitely multi-lingual. The play, we are informed in deadpan tourist brochure style, is about the culture of exercise, of healthy living, of beautification of the city, and revolves around the walking paths of Colombo. It opens to a series of figures emerging from the gloom, arms raised—in supplication or surrender? Gunfire. The figures – in white – jerk, fall down, no wait, of course they do not die, they get up; a reassuring balloon man comes on stage. Silly us. It was not gunfire. It was only some balloons bursting. Men, in pure white, walk in bearing pure white clean guns. Everyone is dressed in white. They form into celebratory team photos – poster shots of the clean righteous joy of victory. Which goes on ... and on. But that can’t go on forever – disconsolation sets in – until they all start exercising! In this fluid style each fragment looks at an aspect of the new lifestyles and behaviours that have emerged around the beautified public spaces dotted around Colombo. The particulars dress the accessories of headphones, hand phones, the self-obsessive culture of selfies, alternating between boredom and hysteria.

‘Sex in the City’

One of the most outstanding pieces titled ‘Sex in the City’ was surely a brilliant visual pun on moral obscenity. A frail and tired looking park cleaner walks in with his ekel broom. As he works he watches a curvaceous, well-groomed woman work out. There is an implicit symbiotic contract between the two. The rampant exhibitionism of the crass well-to-do and the hungry voyeurism of the faceless underclass that arises when the two meet and share public space. It then goes on to unpick the latent sensuality of the physical workout as a form of collective observation, providing unstated gratification and titillation. There is tension that underlies the compulsive watching of each other, and the increasingly bizarre exercise routines becoming increasingly explicit.

‘The World is in my Phone’

Another gem was ‘The World is in my Phone’, which deals with the content of the joggers headphones. Some have Pirith, others the Azan, some have music, some have porn, and some even have children playing. The moment of truth comes when the Azan listener and Pirith listener sit next to each other in the perfectly indifferent amity brought about by privacy. As a comment on the stupidities of sanctimonious public religious sentiment, it was sublime in its ridiculousness.

Omnipresent authority

All this goes on against the background of omnipresent authority. As children, we played on the lions at Independence Square. The new post-war public piety has sanctified the image of the lion. You cannot ride the lions anymore. Someone will growl at you. There are new unknowns wearing unknown uniforms who will growl at you because they now control the beautiful public spaces and also set the rules. They are the keepers of public morals too, arbiters of how much coquettishness lovers can display in public. Where you can walk and where you cannot. They move with the lazy stiffness of the extremely fit, the quietude and satisfied menace of the professionally violent. They are the bouncers of this new public club, guiding you on the behaviours that are allowed. Of course, there is no legal basis for their existence in the public places of civic life – but that matters little because their existence is validated by the power of the ‘one’. And when you step out of line and challenge the rules, or worse still challenge the very model of this urban Pleasantville, they exercise rapidly escalating violence – and nasty things happen… and yes that’s the balloon man with them. The same one from the start of the play. But now, you realise, you are the balloon. He holds you all, and when you break the rules, his rules, he gives you one prick and you hear the flat report of an exploding balloon. The tight organic unity of various leitmotifs, the exploration and adroit bringing together of the various themes into a concluding premise was brilliant. The opulent precision of Thushara Hettihamu’s lighting combined with Ranil Goonewardane’s meditative score and impeccable costuming gave the production a depth and texture that offset the stark minimalism of the set.

Is this truly the best we can be?

Well, does all this really matter in the greater scheme of things – people walking in the park? It does in as much as this is the vision and apogee of modern civic life we are being cajoled into accepting as reality (the corollary being that the vicious underbelly of impunity is the lie). And Guruge poses the question – is this our finest aspiration in urban life, this vacuous façade of modernity rooted in technological gimmicks, propped by public piety held together by menace? Is this truly the best we can be? Depressingly, he might be the 1% that thinks not. Pix by Prauda Buwaneka