Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Sri Lankan-Australian dramatist Ernest MacIntyre recently outlined a new play for the Sri Lankan theater, a national epic staged in the form of “cricket, with a plot”. His model was Bertolt Brecht's call for a new epic theater “like a circus, with a plot.” In the revival of post-Independence Sinhala theater in Sri Lanka Brechtian models have played a germinative role, as traditional forms of verse storytelling, song, and mime were combined with techniques of Brechtian antirealism to produce a distinctive form. In the climate of chauvinist Sinhala nationalism that led to the current civil war, this renewed Sinhala drama is represented as a unique “national” form, expressive of a brave post-independence Sri Lanka.MacIntyre's proposal recognizes that both theater and cricket have been mobilized in the service of the Sri Lankan state's Sinhala nationalism. He seeks a dramatist “fearless in making visible the historical and social material thick in the air or stored under the turf” to produce a new Sri Lankan epic reminiscent of the Brechtian circus, but performed in the form of “slowed down stylized cricket action” to enact a different national story. The story will be told, in the style of a Brechtian narrator, by a series of cricket commentators, including the Australian Tony Greig. Instead of Brecht's acrobats and dancers, MacIntyre proposes “somersaulting fieldsmen, striking ... log in or subscribe to read full text