When Yashoda forgets herself

By Uditha Devapriya

The faintest smile lit up her face. As her eyes widened, she seemed almost at ease. Then she leapt to the past, letting the memories overwhelm her. The frown subsided, the icy stare cooled down, and the words flowed. The wall she had placed in front of me cracked open. She was in character, though only barely.

The smile flickered even more. By now, she’d almost broken through.

But then the icy stare returned, the eyebrows furrowed, and the smile subsided. In their place was an enigmatic frown. Something in the past refused to come into recollection. As she ran through the corridors of her memory, she twitched, almost apologetically. Then tea came, and we halted our conversation. After tea she returned to her old self: the person I had seen onstage, for the first time, a week ago, and the person I had seen on the television and movie screens of my childhood, adolescence, and youth.

“It’s fascinating,” she said all of a sudden, “to forget yourself.”

Yashoda Wimaladharma is the most extraordinary actress of her generation here. Ever since 1986, when her uncle had her onboard a television series, and 1990, when that uncle cast her as a main character in a play which won for her the Best Actress statuette at that year’s State Drama Festival, she’s always tested herself, defied herself, surpassed herself. Part of that exercise, as she put to me several times in our interview, involves letting yourself go. “I don’t pick every script that comes my way,” she smiled. “But I make sure the ones that come my way, the ones I choose, push me beyond my limits.”

It hadn’t been easy at the beginning. Though she wasn’t born with a silver spoon, she was far, far from the first in her family to foray into the performing arts. Her father, Ravilal Wimaladharma, had been Professor of Hindi at Kelaniya University, and had engaged with poetry, music, and the media; he had later launched a Hindi service in the SLBC, to cater to Indian listeners. Her mother had been a teacher of dance. More importantly, her uncle had been a distinguished playwright, director, and actor: Bandula Vithanage. “I owe it to him for having encouraged me,” Yashoda remembered. “I hadn’t even completed my O Levels when he put me in front of a camera, for the first time.”

At St Paul’s Milagiriya, where Yashoda did her A Levels, the atmosphere was friendly and receptive. “Many of my teachers, and all of my friends, went out of their way to help me.

Excelling in her favourite subject, literature, she pursued her education at Kelaniya, where her father taught. “My campus life wasn’t all rosy,” she admitted. “Ragging of the violent, demeaning sort had become the norm then. But that didn’t hinder me.”

Right after her A Levels, Vithanage had chosen her as Emily in Hiru Dahasa, an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Given that she came to theatre through television, she found the new medium a little hard to swallow, and much harder to digest. “There were problems from Day One. For instance, I found I couldn’t project my voice loudly enough. We had to spend six months rehearsing and I had to tone up during that period.”

In the end, fortunately, her efforts paid off. “Not only was there a standing ovation, but when we went to the State Drama Festival, I had all these veteran playwrights and thespians gathering around me. They told me I deserved the Best Actress prize.” Which is what she got in the end, of course, though she never expected it.

“Those days, a newcomer came onstage very rarely. So when people saw me, they were enthralled. Once I got that experience, the theatre became a much more fascinating place to me. Why? Because you’re hanging on to the moment, sustaining the audience’s interest without condescending or pandering to them. Up there you have no retakes and you get no break. You need to give your best performance, throughout.”

Yashoda told me that for an actress, any actress, living one’s role is the most difficult and yet most essential part of the job. “That’s why, when I played Emily’s role in Hiru Dahasa, I felt I needed to learn about this subject. I wanted to straddle campus life with acting.”

The problem was that there hadn’t been any acting schools at the time here. “Even now, we don’t have teachers for the subject.” In the 1970s, the peak decade as far as the cinema and theatre in Sri Lanka is concerned, there had been Salamon Fonseka and Shelton Payagala. But Salaman would soon fade into obscurity, while Payagala would die young.

By the time Yashoda came of age onstage, there remained only one professional well versed in the subject who could teach her. That man was Jayantha Chandrasiri. Yashoda’s father, realising her potential, took her to meet him.

In my interview I made the cardinal mistake of asking her when he finished teaching her. She raised her eyebrows. “I’ve never stopped learning under him.”

Her training took some years. It hadn’t been difficult. By nature a voracious reader, she had collected as many books as she could on the subject. While technique isn’t the be-all and end-all of acting, she nevertheless educated herself on the latest methods, tips, tricks, and shortcuts. Of particular interest had been the Method, perhaps the most misinterpreted acting approach the world has ever known.

Being an exponent of the Method, Jayantha Chandrasiri had naturally taught it to her as well. “The point with the Method is to seamlessly enter a character’s life. This appealed to me, since back then I wanted to know how one could forget oneself, to create the illusion that one is being another person.”

Surprisingly for someone who went through all this because of the theatre, Yashoda hasn’t been in many plays. Four productions over 30 years hardly amount to much, after all. Once she was done with Hiru Dahasa, she took part in Venisiye Velenda, Trojan Kanthawo, and Makarakshaya. The latter two, by Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, go on record as two of the finest contemporary political dramas this country has ever seen.

In Trojan Kanthawo, as Andromache, Yashoda acts opposite Anoja Weerasinghe. Part of the pleasure of watching Bandaranayake’s story unfold is seeing these two collide with each other. The level of dedication and commitment required, to personify not just the suffering of the women but also, more importantly, their submission in the face of the victors, is no doubt immense. Both Yashoda and Anoja have thus been nothing short of brilliant in their performances, as Hecuba and Andromache, over the last two decades.

She has been much more prodigious in film, though even there she’s been spare in her choices. According to Nuwan Nawayanjith Kumara, her first role had been in an Indian film: 1992’s Acharyan. Next was Vijaya Dharma Sri’s Guru Gedara, in 1993. Her first major performance came two years later, in Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Maruthaya: in hindsight one of his lesser works, but important to me because, in it, Yashoda acts in a way radically different to how she would perform in later productions.

In Maruthaya, Yashoda is all hysterics, barely containing her anger and barely concealing her contempt for all those hostile towards her and her family. Cast opposite that other actress as symbolic of her era as she would be, Sangeetha Weeraratne, Yashoda fumes, rages, and scowls perpetually. She is uncharacteristic, almost unlike herself. When in the second half of the film she and her sister (Sangeetha) enter the world of nightclubs, she goes beyond the limits of her usual self without breaking her credibility. In contrast to the more vociferous sister, she seems almost tame, but more often than not she breaks down.

No better film can illustrate the contrast between this detour in her career than the next role she got through Obeyesekere: as a girl, ostensibly born to rich parents, in search of her origins in Theertha Yathra. And no better actress juxtaposes with her better than Sangeetha. This twin disjuncture, or contradiction – between her outbursts in Maruthaya and her calm demeanour post-Maruthaya on the one hand and between her and Sangeetha’s approaches on the other – comes up in Jayantha Chandrasiri’s Guerilla Marketing.

Here, at least until that point in her career, we see Yashoda at her best: the former lover of the protagonist, who is now married to the partner at his ad agency at which both women work. Sangeetha’s outbursts at her husband’s descent into madness, at once sincere and unendurable, are a world away from Yashoda’s more introspective posture.

Among her most recent work, Samanala Sandhwaniya takes the cake. “Jayantha aiya posed a unique challenge in that project. When he gave me the script, he told me to finish all my other work and come back with a fresh mind.” While she had brought her preconceived notions about acting to her other roles, Jayantha had been adamant that she approach it as a newcomer here. “The effect he wanted was basically this: when I come onscreen, you don’t see me, you see my character, Punya.”

He had, in other words, wanted her to go beyond a simple naturalism of style. “Until then I’d always consciously get into the skins of my characters. Jayantha aiya told me to take one step further. With Soorya Dayaruwan it was easy, since he was literally a newcomer. I wasn’t. That’s why I relished acting in the film. The challenge was unique, unlike any other I’d faced until then.” Not surprisingly, it was celebrated as her finest performance in years, the sort you almost never get to see with Sri Lankan actors.

Quite a different challenge, also unique, faced her in Vaishnavee, where for the entirety of the story she has to act emotionless while, at the end, she unearths its emotional core. But that’s for another time, another essay. For now, I’m done with this one.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com