Timely appeal for sanity and introspection:Dissanayake’s ‘2019 Jooli Maase Davasak’

Rajitha Dissanayake’s (RD) play 2019 Jooli Maase Davasak (A Day in July 2019) staged at Kamatha (BMICH) on Saturday 3rd of August 2024, still has the same urgency and relevance – as it had at the time of its unveiling in January 2022 – in today’s politically impulsive context in which there are covert and overt attempts to stir the inflammable instincts of people fostered by mutual suspicions about ethnic and religious differences and biases.

The play takes as its cue, the wanton carnage that shocked the entire nation on 21 April, 2019, with its ruthlessness bordering on sheer insanity. Hence, hardly anyone can miss the insinuations couched in “2019”, specified and highlighted in the title- its links to the then volatile political context embroiled in the latent ethnic and religion-based resentments stirred by the insidious narratives of ‘Wanda (sterilising) kottu’, premeditated abortions, etc. Perhaps, the Sinhala word ‘Jooli’, with its familiar connotations of chaos, shock and confusion as implied in terms like Jooli hathai, Mala jooliyai , becomes more suggestive of the horrors of that fateful day of the Easter Sunday attack than when it is merely meant to be taken as a calendar month- be it April, July or any other.

The play starts with an arranged meeting between Dhanushka (Nalin Lusena) and Dinu (Sulochana Weerasinghe) in an apartment of a friend, giving the audience the idea of it being a story about ‘clandestine’ love, emotions and relationships going awry. The word ‘clandestine’ is used with reservations because RD looks at human relationships more openly than the conventions permit. The end of the play is poignant in that Dinu falls to death while she was trying to escape from the balcony to avoid the certain exposure of her date with Dhanushka who is married to Nilu (Jayani Senanayake), a military search being conducted in the whole area on the tipoff of some suicide bombers intent on large-scale destruction. The fact that the end reveals it to be a false alarm increases the pathos of the play. And, it reveals RD’s questioning of the prudish views on love and human relations in a conventional society. The shawl – suggestive of a Muslim women’s headscarf – which Dhanushka wraps around Dinu’s head saying that she looks pretty in it and the latter’s reciprocating the mutual tenderness of the moment, forms a subtle link between the play’s pungent criticism of the racial and religious acrimony ingrained in society – which, the megalomaniac politicians readily exploit for power games and our constrictive and prim views on love, marriage and ‘betrayal’ and the resulting obstacles for the endless possibilities of broader and more tender human relations- a fond theme of RD, which is certain to flower more vividly in his future plays.

The constant conflict between Dhanushka, who is progressive in his outlook and Mathangaweera (Sampath Jayaweera), the shrewd financier, rabid racist and religious extremist is instrumental in maintaining the tension of the play which penetrates our chronic human estrangements based on culturally assimilated, illusive ethnic and religious identities and how they have become grist to the devious political mill which erodes all human values with its relentless drive towards more power, corrupt deals that play havoc in people’s lives in endless ways, and shut down all paths to social progress and harmony.

There is constant tension from the beginning of the play due to the false warning of a suicide attack. This edgy atmosphere brings to surface all sorts of the human foibles, strengths, crudity and phobia, which RD cleverly uses to urge us to understand the human predicament in a corrosive social and political swamp which tends to forbid self-interrogation and sober reflection of the forces that conspire to trap our thinking in devious ways. The play ends in a distressing note because of Dhanushka’s unexpected moral failure and the abject submission to Manthangaweera’s stranglehold on him under the threat of exposure of his ‘tryst’ with Dinu. The play ends allowing us to look at human predicament enmeshed in a vicious grid of political manipulation that corrodes all that is good in humans and in society and sharpening our sensibilities. The bomb scare which proves to be a false alarm in the end does not disappoint the audience; instead it heightens the focal irony of the play in the event of Madushanka’s complete and startling about-turn.

RD has been economical with the cast and stage props to offer us a fine theatre experience. In addition to the main characters mentioned above, Gihan de Chickera (Manoj), Anuradha Mallawaarachchi (army officer), Prasadini Athapuththu (Kamani), Anuk Fernando (Ranuka) and Lenin Liyanage and Devinda Wickramasinghe (soldiers) – even those who have only short spans of appearance on stage – play their roles impressively to enable the veteran playwright and director, Rajitha Dissanayake, to jolt us out of our complacency and give us an unforgettable theatre experience of around one and a half hours.

Susantha Hewa