Tony Ranasinghe,in full flow
By Uditha Devapriya
This is the third and final in a series of candid vignettes about Tony Ranasinghe.
Pauline Kael once observed of Marlon Brando that his characters suggested tragic force. Comparable as he would have been to Brando, Gamini Fonseka never epitomised this kind of force: the closest he ever came to embodying it in Parasathumal, as the well-meaning but wayward nobleman who thinks he can do and get away with anything. In that sense Tony Ranasinghe was closer to Brando than he may have realised: the romantic heroes he played clamoured after women they could never have. This was same of the husbands he played too. Filled with jealousy, Ranasinghe’s characters never fulfilled their hopes. And yet they didn’t lack the looks: there was nothing in their appearance that debarred them from their lovers. Due to some issue or the other, however, they remained frustrated.
By the end of the 1970s he had changed completely. Having played the lover for a decade, he had now played the husband for another decade. His profile and outline had altered, considerably: his face had wizened, his frown had sharpened, and his figure, which had once suggested youth if not fragility, now suggested a father-figure. In Ahasin Polawata in 1979, opposite Vasanthi Chathurani, he had played the brother-in-law. Barely a year later he was playing her father in Ganga Addara. The latter role is significant because it marks a turning point in his career: he had evolved, and at a time when the two biggest stars of the screen, Vijaya and Gamini, did all they could to remain young, he had let go.
Even as the lover and husband, Ranasinghe’s characters could barely conceal their rage: in the morning after the accident in Delovak Athara, he shouts at his servant-boy for asking him for the family car. In Maya, he is gentle and pliable at first with the journalist who wants to know about his wife’s and daughter’s murders. The very next moment, he is raising his voice, and screaming at the reporter to get out. In Ganga Addara he is friendly enough with his poor nephew; when he finds out his affair with his daughter, he hollers at him to move away. The thread that runs through all these characters is their lack of refinement and polished elegance: if they feel intimidated, they lose all sense of decorum. They may look dapper and polite, but they are incapable of controlling their anger.
Curiously enough, however, he never found a home in the New Wave that swept across the local cinema in the 1970s. In Walmath wuwo he is out of place as an unemployed graduate, opposing Cyril Wickramage. Not unlike Gamini Fonseka, he never found a part for himself in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s films. Dharmasena Pathiraja’s world is full of outcasts and outsiders, and neither Fonseka nor Ranasinghe found their calling in such roles: that was left to Vijaya Kumaratunga, who epitomised the kind of freewheeling youthful idealism that Ranasinghe had long forsaken. When Ranasinghe did play prominent parts in the films of the new wave directors, it was later, in more cynical roles: as the corrupt inspector in Sisila Gini Gani, the cynical prosecutor in Anantha Rathriya, and the father in Salelu Warama.
In the 1980s Ranasinghe began writing screenplays. Tony was a literary man, a thespian: unlike Gamini Fonseka and Vijaya Kumaratunga, he spent his time in the theatre before entering the cinema. Some of the screenplays he worked on at this time suggest the themes he wanted to explore – many of them have to do with familial relations – and the source material he preferred. Most of these screenplays were adaptations of contemporary Sinhala literature: both Awaragira and Duwata Mawaka Misa, for instance, are based on novels by G. B. Senananayake. These adaptations are interesting if not intriguing because they suggest a deeply literary sensibility. Moreover, adaptations though they are, there is a consistent attempt in them to translate the plot in its entirety to the screen. That is why Awaragira, and Duwata Mawaka Misa, looks and feels long. It bears out what Lester Peries observed of Awaragira: that it could have worked better as a television serial than a film.
The point I am trying to make or imply here is that Ranasinghe’s attitude to adaptations of literary texts and plays reflected his notions about acting. His critique of Marlon Brando’s performance as Mark Antony was essentially that Brando went beyond what he saw as permissible limits: he didn’t act, he “mumbled.” This was his critique of Richard Burton too: “as an actor he stood out in a way few among his generation did,” he told me. “But in later years he collapsed and deteriorated, to a point where, like Brando, he lost all sense of discipline.” In other words, an actor’s talent depends on his fidelity to his craft, just as his performance depends on its fidelity to the source. This attitude colours his screenplays as well: long as they are, they are marked out by their fidelity to the original text. They are, for the lack of a better way of putting it, quite literary in their conception.
An often-underrated aspect to Ranasinghe’s career, as a screenwriter, was his penchant for comedy. Every other person I know here has watched or at least heard of Nonawarune Mahathwarune, but few among them know that Ranasinghe wrote the series. In his tribute to Ranasinghe after his death in 2015, Chandran Rutnam remembered an aborted project for a comedy they had worked on: it was to star Joe Abeywickrema and it would have been set during the Japanese raid on Sri Lanka in World War II. Curiously enough, however, he never played a comic role: his temperament was obviously much too cynical and hardened for him to do so. His looks suggested a man capable of great refinement, but also insatiable anger: a quality he made much use of in one of his finest performances, cast against type, as Dabare the gang leader in H. D. Premaratne’s Saptha Kanya – a role for which he bagged top honours from the Sarasaviya, Swarna Sanka, and OCIC Awards.
In Saptha Kanya Ranasinghe loosens himself so well that when we see Gamini Fonseka in Loku Duwa we are immediately reminded of this earlier performance. He never lets out his anger: he keeps it in, preferring to draw the protagonist into a cat-and-mouse game that the ending refuses to resolve. This was a performance the likes of which Ranasinghe never got again, just as Fonseka never got a role like the one he played in Loku Duwa again. In it he reaches out as far as he can, outside his zone, and does wonders. It goes without saying that like Fonseka’s mudalali, Dabare suggests Ranasinghe’s comic potential: something he had only lightly touched in his earlier incarnation as a lover and a husband. Never again was he to replicate this comic finesse: he ended up playing the wise but often flawed grandfatherly or fatherly figure in subsequent roles, right until his passing away.
Tony Ranasinghe’s career, for me at least, represents the peak of the Sinhalese cinema. A product of a middle-class suburban Catholic family, Ranasinghe emerged in the immediate aftermath of 1956 and Sinhala Only. An admirer of Arisen Ahubudu, he was, not unlike Henry Jayasena and even Gamini Fonseka, well-read and quite literary. His contribution to the Sinhala theatre has not been as appreciated as his work in the cinema, partly because while he made the waves as a member of Sugathapala de Silva’s acting troupe in his early years, his later career in the theatre was as a translator: he never achieved the status that the likes of Dharmasiri Bandaranayake did. Yet these figure in as the most definitive Sinhala translations of the Bard’s plays, faithful as they are to the spirit of the original.
Not surprisingly, it is his acting career that has garnered and continues to garner interest. As a performer he stood away and apart from the trends that made up his day and age: as he himself told me in our interview, he found Method Acting too intellectualised, and he point-blank rejected any notion of acting that emphasised a separation between the cinema and the theatre. For him, no actor could emerge in film without having gone through the stage. Whether or not one agreed with this perspective, it is clear that to the best of his abilities, Ranasinghe stood by the principle underlying it. As an actor, a dramatist, and a screenwriter, he valued fidelity to the source text and material above almost everything else. This was his aesthetic, one he adhered to right until his last days. One can say that the Sinhalese cinema profited much from his elan and his attitude. The Sinhalese theatre, too.
The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
