Richard: 32 years later

By Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

It is 32 years today since the body of Richard de Zoysa was washed ashore, after his abduction by government forces. This is a significant date for now he has been dead for longer than he lived. He was just a few weeks short his 32^nd birthday when he was killed by government forces. Though this seems an absurd anniversary to think about, I had long thought of it as the time when he would fade further and further into the past, and memory too would begin to die. Thankfully that has not happened and the years of friendship with him are still vivid in my mind.

Richard was the best of companions when I returned from Oxford, and he understood immediately what education should be, at a time when it was being reduced to rote learning. Ashley Halpe still did a great job at Peradeniya but the universities in general were fading, and schools were a mess except where there were exceptional teachers such as at Ladies College. But elsewhere it was rote learning and the taking down of notes, even dictated ones.

I have written extensively about Richard, our friendship, as well as his political development, but today I will confine myself to the programmes we did together, which would never have happened without his enthusiasm and his skill at bringing literature alive. This was contributed from the start, in my first effort to introduce a different approach to literature. That was ‘The Romantic Dilemma’ on the Ladies College stage, illustrating the differences between the older and the younger Romantic poets, read by youngsters whom he brought to me and trained in the nuances we wanted. This was followed by a discussion of different approaches to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ a text at the time, in which we showed how Juliet could be decisive or forlorn, Lady Capulet harsh or helpless, Mercutio lively or despairing.

On my radio programmes,,he read the poetry I talked about, roping in Yolande Abeywira and Jeanne Pinto, older ladies who adored him. We extended such programmes to the British Council when I started working there, and though the first such programme, ‘Flights of Fancy’, presenting a range of poetry about birds, drew only a small audience, it was incredibly well received and attendance grew and grew over the next few months.

He and Yolande went with me to training colleges where we got the students to think about their texts, most interestingly through different approaches to ‘Macbeth’ which was the text at the College at Penideniya. The journeys, too, were great fun, the three of us talking and laughing all the way up and down. We would prepare the different approaches in the car, for I knew I could trust them to get across the nuances I wanted. And they did this even on the day we got carried away and talked, so that it was only through my argument at the College itself that they knew what was wanted.

By the end of 1984, my first year at the British Council, I became more ambitious, inspired after Geraldine McEwan had performed her One-Woman Jane Austen show in November 1984. So early in the following year, I devised a One Man show for Richard, based on some of the novels of Charles Dickens.

Richard was quite magnificient in perfomance, catching the different nuances in six extracts, tragic, comic, pathetic, pompous. I selected music for the different extracts which caught the mood, ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ for Mr Podsnap extolling the virtues of England, sentimental Elgar for the death of Steerforth which was perhaps the most impressive piece in the show. We toured this round the country, including to Batticaloa, and had a marvelous time, looking up old students there.

This was such a success that the following year I put together something based on Kipling, poems and stories. Richard was lyrical in ‘The Way through the Woods’, ridiculous as the butterflies in ‘The Butterfly who Stamped’, rousing in ‘Gunga Din’. That, too, was taken all over the country and we loved the evenings together after the performances were over.

In Galle we stayed at the Sun and Sea Hotel in Unawatuna where Richard and his stage manager Varuna Karunatilleke were joined by Aruni Devaraja and her sister for a lovely holiday, when we explored Madol Doowa of Martin Wickremesinghe fame.

The following year, Richard directed a production of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ with a talented young cast, including Ranmali Pathirana, who now worked with me at the Council, as Portia. I had, however, come back from my round the world trip to find Richard had taken on one of his young protégés and his girlfriend for two minor parts, and they could not act at all. I was highly critical and, though Richard was a bit upset, he replaced them, getting the experienced Kumar Mirchandani to play Lancelot Gobbo, which led to a romance with Ranmali and their getting married.

That too, was great fun, and, in addition to several shows in Colombo, it was performed in Kandy where students of the Penideniya Training College attended, so we could have a discussion on the play there afterwards. And the highlight was taking it to the Pasdunrata College of Education after which David Woolger the Council consultant there, hosted dinner at his house in Wadduwa which had a swimming pool in which the youngsters frolicked.

But then things began to change. Steve de la Zylwa produced ‘Accidental Death of an Anarchist’ in the Council Hall and I recall Richard reflecting that Shakespeare was comparatively precious, given the trauma the country was undergoing. He felt he should have been more in touch with new socio-political trends and sometimes I feel that that contributed to his increasing politicisation in the next couple of years.

When the following year I went to his father’s house at Hendala for his 30^th birthday, I met his latest find, a boy called Dahanayake, through whom and indeed more his brother Richard got involved with the JVP.

And then I saw less of him, for he was getting more involved in politics, the story of which he was to tell me in some detail at the end of 1989, when he spent several nights at home under worrying circumstances. He had been led to this through the students he spent more and more time with, Dahanayake, whom he had met through the elder brother I saw at Hendala, and Madura.

The latter was an enormously talented actor and dominated the production Scott Richards put on after a workshop which brought these boys together with the more sophisticated youngsters who had been the staple of such workshops, including Richard’s Josephians from an earlier incarnation. I was very impressed by these new finds, and when Richard asked if one of them, Prasanna Liyanage, could work for me as a CAT in the Cultural Affairs Trainee programme I had started with Mrinali Thalgodapitiya – I agreed at once.

He was very good and when his stint was over I asked Richard if Madura would like to take over. But Richard told me that, after much thought, Madura had refused, on the grounds that entering into that world would cut him off from his roots.

It was a forceful decision, for a boy still in his teens, to take. Richard had explained to me, how these scholarship boys had felt alienated at Royal, which was still dominated by an elite, with not much effort made to integrate them and ensure that both groups benefited from the strengths of the other – something I had tried to do with the Advanced Senior Secondary English Teaching (ASSET) course I had started at the time.

Madura and a couple of the others went on to deep involvement with the JVP, and when Madura was abducted, never to be heard of again, the net began to close on Richard as well. What was happening became clear after his last performance at the Council, when he called after he had left to ask if I had noticed a strange man in the audience. It was his tail, he said, and he wanted to spend the night at home for safety, which he did twice more in the next couple of weeks.

But I will not dwell here on what happened afterwards. Instead, as befits this celebration, I will talk about that last performance, which we put on to celebrate Robert Browning on the centenary of his death. Though by then he was out of fashion, I felt he was a wonderful writer, and was delighted that Regi Siriwardena thought the same and was willing to talk about him. But we told him to be brief, and the bulk of the programme was readings by Richard of the poetry.

It was a glorious performance, capturing the excitement of ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix’ with its galloping anapaests, lugubrious in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ which I told him to model on our good friend Suresh Thambipillai, chilling in ‘My Last Duchess’. At the end Lakshmi de Silva, who had been at the first performance we had put on together at the Council, said to me fervently that it was the type of evening that made her glad to be alive.

I was not here when, two months later, he was abducted and killed. That is a small blessing for I remember not that horror but rather the ebullience of his stage presence, which he replicated also in our long conversations. My sister once said she wished she could eavesdrop when she heard me laughing uproariously when I was talking to him on the phone. That is what remains, joy rather than sadness, the exuberance of a commitment to life.