‘Akuna’: a spellbinding feast for the eyes

Theatre is one of the most spellbinding arts, a truly immersive audio-visual experience, and veteran theatre practitioner Jerome de Silva is a master. With over 50 years of experience in Sri Lankan theatre, Jerome has over 75 productions under his belt, and is the Founder of The WorkShop Players, one of Sri Lanka’s foremost English amateur theatre groups, which is famed for bringing some of the best of Broadway musicals such as ‘Oliver!,’ ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘Evita,’ ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ and most recently the highly-acclaimed ‘Les Miserables’ to the local stage.

Jerome is also the first individual from English theatre to be awarded the ‘Kala Keerthi’ – Sri Lanka’s highest national honour for the arts. He is currently busy at work with final rehearsals for his epic original musical ‘Akuna’ featuring The Lionel Wendt WorkShop Players. 

Brunch visited Jerome at rehearsal for a chat on ‘Akuna,’ what it’s about, and how it came to be. 

Q: Tell us about how ‘Akuna’ came to be?

What happened was, in June 2019, in collaboration with and under the aegis of the Lionel Wendt Theatre, we started The Lionel Wendt WorkShop Players – a trilingual workshop for Sri Lankan theatre practitioners. In August 2019, we formed a second workshop group, The Lionel Wendt Little Stars WorkShop Players group. 

The Lionel Wendt WorkShop Players group is made of mainly Sinhala actors from Sri Lankan universities and takes a serious approach to theatre, somewhat unlike The Workshop Players, who practice theatre more as a hobby and perform for six months before taking a hiatus for another six months (incidentally, The WorkShop Players has been on hiatus three or four years now because of the pandemic).

As The Lionel Wendt WorkShop Players are very serious about drama, we decided to study and work through the major theatre practitioners starting with Stanisllavski and also looking at various forms of character design and visual drama and brainstorming a production to show our talent. With our natural talent and training, we thought it should be an original production and that we should do a musical. 

Eventually, we brainstormed and created our own musical drama, ‘Akuna’. What we developed was a trilingual performance that was not just political satire, but something bigger. We’ve been working on ‘Akuna’ since 2019, and it was initially to be performed in March 2020. This was, of course, postponed, because of the pandemic. 

I’ve always been impressed by the style and genre of ‘Hamilton,’ which brought young audiences back by using rap and hip hop even against a historical setting and we decided to incorporate historical characters too, but not quite. That’s how we have the Kashyapas, the Ashokas, the Ashokamalas, and all of that. ‘Akuna’ also combines traditional music and choreography with modern music and dance like hip-hop, rock, and jazz. 

That was how the whole thing came about,  through brainstorming sessions with everyone contributing. ‘Akuna’ is also the first original production I’ve written despite having been in theatre for over 50 years. 

Q: Tell us a bit more about the different things happening within ‘Akuna’?

It was the result of a brainstorm, which is always where the most harebrained, and ultimately, most successful ideas, come from. Everyone came up with ‘we must have a Kashyapa,’ ‘we must have Ashoka,’ ‘we must have an Ashokamala,’ and so we brought them in. ‘Akuna’ has a lot of political undertones. For example, Ashoka is very much the dictator of the progressive nation we see in ‘Akuna,’ and Kashyapa is, well, the one who does the work while the other guy gets the credit. We’ve also brought in a love story, or triangle rather, and this is part of why ‘Akuna’ uses so many people in its cast.

I am also a die-hard Shakespeare fan, so you see a lot of Shakespearean themes and influences coming into ‘Akuna’ as well, from ‘The Tempest’ to ‘Twelfth Night’ to ‘Winter’s Tale,’ and because we were studying the gamut of theatre practitioners, you also find influences from Greek theatre and this altogether comes with visual elements like traditional Sri Lankan masks to create a kaleidoscope of characters, visuals, and stories. 

Q: ‘Akuna’ is a trilingual production, your first trilingual production. How does the production stay trilingual? 

It’s predominantly in Sinhalese, with narrators speaking in English and Tamil. This aspect of ‘Akuna’ came out in brainstorming. I’m dreadful with my Sinhalese – I speak Singlish, more or less, much to the amusement of my cast – and they found that quite intriguing when I was teaching. Many of them want to be fluent in English and I would always tell them not to feel shy and to speak in English to become more fluent. As workshops and ‘Akuna’ evolved, I also grew out of my shyness of working in Sinhala and the show evolved into a trilingual production. 

I also wanted to bring in the English lot of The WorkShop Players and not deprive them of The Lionel Wendt WorkShop Players, especially since we haven’t had a production since 2018, so ‘Akuna’ became trilingual and sort of Westernised as well so our old audience can come back. 

The language used is not hypervoluting and is easy to understand because it’s language from everyday situations. ‘Akuna’ is political satire and covers situations that are very relevant and easy to understand visually. Music and drama are also universal languages and carry the message through.

We’ve also opted not to do the fancy souvenirs we normally do and instead sell (at a nominal fee), the printed script with the English and Sinhala dialogue for people to look through before the show or during the interval. Some teachers who are bringing their students have already pre-booked these scripts for the students. The story is quite simple. I wrote it in English and it was translated to Sinhala (there were huge arguments when working on the translation).

It’s easy to understand and at the end of the day, it’s a spectacular production. A mega-production with a 72-member cast; we’re also using different technology like LED walls, projections, animations, and video. It’s going to be very entertaining and a feast for the eyes. 

Q: Do you have any concerns about staging political satire given how sensitive things can get politically? 

‘Akuna’ has already passed the Censor Board and it’s not that controversial, it’s mainly taking a dig at some of the big political events of Sri Lanka. I don’t believe in slamming anyone for the sake of it. Theatre should be entertainment more than anything else –  at least that’s what I believe. It shouldn’t be about what I want people to believe or understand or to make a comment about the past situation, present situation, or future situation. It should simply be like holding a mirror to life and this is what ‘Akuna’ does. It will strike familiar chords in some way with all people. 

‘Akuna’ will be performed at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre from 11 to 13 March.

The opening night show (on Friday 11 March) will start at 7 p.m., and on 12 and 13 March there will be matinee performances at 3 p.m. followed by the evening performance at 7 p.m. 

From 8-20 March there will be an exhibition by The Lionel Wendt WorkShop Players of the various media of visual and performance art; 16-20 March there will be a festival of original short plays performed by The Lionel Wendt WorkShop Players.