There’s a sweet, almost naive sense of innocence in the early performances of Vasanthi Chathurani. It’s a new sensibility, to me, since a very few actors here, male or female, have been as able as she has been to project a form of purity that is at once enticing and delicate. Most of our actors are content in entrancing ...
Sena, the protagonist of Madawala S. Ratnayake’s Akkara Paha, embodies for me the failure of the post-1956 youth to realise their social aspirations. Lester James Peries selected Milton Jayawardena, then an unknown player, for the role in his adaptation, while days after his choice was finalised he was visited by Vijaya Kumaratunga. I think it was a blessing, for ...
I first encountered T. M. Jayaratne through the films of K. A. W. Perera. I never bothered to check out his other work because, for me, he was at his best when he was crooning about love, be it young, requited, spurned, or revived. The themes these movies evoked, I felt, were most sincerely articulated by his voice. It ...
A tribute to Vijaya Nandasiri, who left us but not our consciousness a year ago. Vijaya Nandasiri was greater than his successors in Sinhala comedy the same way that Joe Abeywickrema was greater than his predecessors. The latter was the apotheosis of Eddie Jayamanne. He was of course greater than Eddie could be, since Eddie’s roots were in the ...
She is known for her acting, particularly during a time when film as is known here and today was at its peak. She has her associations, her acquaintances, those she met and befriended on and off the set. To limit her to cinema however would be doing her an injustice, something she implies early on in the interview. Yes, ...
She has acted in over 40 films. Her signature is evident in them all, to the extent that we sense her presence even before she enters a scene or sequence. That’s class. That’s Sangeetha Weeraratne. Yes, she was part of my growing up, figuring in those movies and TV shows I saw. But there is something in her I ...
I remember a conversation I had with a budding playwright. This person, a friend of mine and fully conversant in English, was a fanatic when it came to the English theatre here. He followed play after play with interest. His reviews of them were spot on, for the obvious reason that he himself had acted in some of them ...
There’s a sequence of overpowering lyrical rawness in Welikathara where the protagonist and his wife fight over each other’s pasts; it transforms the plot from a terse, Cape Fear-esque thriller to something pulpier, taking us back to the whodunit potboilers of the forties and the fifties. That sequence was only partly there in the restored version, shown about two ...
Shakespeare is universal. Indeed, he may have been the world’s first truly universal artist. That’s hardly a contestable fact. But transposing him to another setting, and in the process spilling half his essence in the dust, is formidable. It cannot be done. Lesser men have given up. Nonetheless, from among those who tried and tested this incomparable writer in ...
When you listen to “Saragaye”, and watch the video online, you get enveloped in complete happiness. In some vague, indefinable, almost magical way, Sanuka Wickramasinghe has given a form to our collective experience of one night stands and crushes and unrequited romances. And yet the elders don’t like him: they lambast him over every little detail. Even the choice ...
