Richard de Zoysa : The other side of

paradise

Uditha Devapriya-Wednesday, November 23, 2016

The first thing that struck you about him was his voice. Polished,
elegant, and not a little jarring, it helped explained his figure,
which was at once filled with resolve and fear. It was these two
qualities, perhaps, that explained how self-contradictory the man
was: a scion of the elite, yet fighting against the same values that
same elite fought so hard to solidify against everyone else. He
paid a price for this act of rebellion and that price was his life, but

upon his death he sealed his name for posterity. Lifes like that, I
suppose: you remember the dead and you never forget the
murdered.

Had he lived, Richard de Zoysa

would have been 58. He was little more than 32 when he was
killed, and brutally so, away from the solitude of his house and
family. This is not a politically coloured tribute to the man, but a
take on the fields of activity he took to: the theatre, the cinema,
and literature.
Remarkable actor
I am no thespian and I suppose not being one makes it difficult for
me to comment on the theatre. I was born long after Richard
passed away and hence, it will take nothing short of a miracle for
me to assess his worth as a playwright and actor (onstage, that
is). His credits in the theatre were many and while not all of them
could be regarded as monumental (they have long since been
forgotten), it is certainly true that even with the lesser among
them he came out remarkably as an actor.
The only play which featured him, that I have read with any sort
of interest, was Regi Siriwardenas take on the Soviet dissident
Nikolai Bukharin, The Long Days Task, in which Richard was not
only the courageous dissident destined for the guillotine, but also
a key shaper in the tone, the nuances, and the general direction
of the plot.
Being a film buff, I was always more entranced by his credits in
our cinema. Richard de Zoysa was there in two masterpieces that
won praise in (almost) every quarter, Tissa Abeysekaras Viragaya
and Lester James Peries Yuganthaya.

Fervent revolutionary
In the former, he is an idealist, a character who was not featured
in Martin Wickramasinghes novel but who was scripted in to its
adaptation by the director to provide a point of reference for the
largely socialist tilt it manifested towards the end.
In the latter, arguably the pinnacle of his career, he is the fervent
revolutionary, the prodigal son of the merciless capitalist, who
turns against his own family in his quest for social justice. His
performance as Malin in that film, for obvious reasons, deserves
scrutiny, but only after a brief perusal of his life.
Richard Manik de Zoysa was born in Colombo on March 18, 1958.
He was the product of a mixed marriage: his father was Sinhalese
and his mother, who later became a key voice for bereaved
mothers, wives, and daughters, was Tamil. Young Richard was
sent to S. Thomas College in Mount Lavinia, which had an active
theatre culture and where, under the patronage of the then Head
Master and Sinhala teacher D. S. Jayasekera, his penchant for the
subject was encouraged. He was also a debater, while he won the
Best Actor award at the Shakespeare Drama Competition in 1972.
He came from a particular social background and this, it must be
admitted, explains the many contradictions his later career as an
activist bred. As I pointed out, he was part of the elite, but being
part of the elite he naturally saw the many ills and tumours which
were being bred and perpetuated by them. He rebelled, naturally,
and to this end sought refuge in progressive social movements. To
date, he remains the only serious spokesperson for the New Left
who emerged from the English-speaking intelligentsia, a feat no
other person achieved. As a journalist too, he shone: during his
last few years he was the head of the Colombo office of the
prestigious Inter Press Service.
And in a large sense, those two film roles solidified the image of
him as someone who detested compromise, who had a vision for
the world and the society he was part of, and who wasnt beset by
the many fault-lines that encountered him as he set about

reforming his community. In Yuganthaya, as the son of the

ruthless Simon Kabilana, Malin (Richard) gave the impression of
being a crusader at odds with his physique. At the beginning of
that remarkable but overlooked film, we get it that he and his
friend Aravinda (Douglas Ranasinghe) dabbled in Marxism in
London, but we also get it that while Aravinda has shrugged off all
that in his quest to rise socially, Malin hasnt exactly let go of that
(even as his own family jokes about it and as we are deceived into
thinking that he will become as indifferent as every other child of
the colonial bourgeoisie sent abroad to study).
Yuganthaya is considered by a great many critics as the weakest
in Martin Wickramasinghes Koggala trilogy (it was written after
Gamperaliya but before Kaliyugaya, even though the events in it
take place after the latter), and it was left to Lester James Peries
to salvage it from the political to bring it to realm of the personal.
He did this by focusing the energy and the tension of the plot on
the relationship between Simon and Malin.
Political sympathies
To this end, he went (whether unwittingly or not, we never can
tell) for two actors who, by coincidence, represented the exact
same political sympathies they exhibited in the film: Gamini
Fonseka as Simon, and Richard as Malin. Gamini was by then a
recluse, a virtual loner who had bucks to spend and who had
become to our cinema what the likes of Bogart, Wayne, and Burt
Lancaster had been to Hollywood.
Richard, on the other hand, was more fragile, sensitive, and
refined. Gaminis depiction of Simon was wholly aligned with the
image of his character as a coarse, rough, by-his-own-bootstraps
businessman, while the image of his son as a more detached, less
vulgar gentlemen added to the films inner turmoil, as he turned
to the burgeoning trade union movement against his own family.
This came out even in how these two spoke: Simon was the
gruffer of the two, Malin the more soft-spoken.
Celebrated finale

Actors are by default flamboyant and the more flamboyant among

them create an image which outlasts their life. So it was with
Chaplin, so it was with some of our own actors and thespians.
More often than not, this image subsisted on a dichotomy. In the
case of Chaplin, that was a dichotomy between good and evil,
with the latter represented as an externalised force which the
mans characters combated.
With Richard too, such a dichotomy existed, even in those few
roles he played in the cinema: even as Malin, you never forgot
that, try as he might, he was always bonded to a class
background that was incongruent with his beliefs, so much so that
this conflict could only be resolved if that background was
externalised. He could do this in only one way: by openly spurning
his father.
And so, in that celebrated finale, Richard is carried away
triumphantly by his cohorts in the Trade Union, while a
despondent Simon looks on, with a close-up to his face which
Sarath Amunugama would, in a speech delivered at the second
Lester James Peries and Sumitra Peries Oration held four years
ago, succinctly compare to the cold, harrowing, and tragic faces in
Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin. It jarred, not surprisingly, when
he was cast as the wayward son in Parakrama Niriellas
Yashorawaya.
No one can seriously contend that he was miscast in that series,
but the point is that because we had got used to a set image of
the man as a blue-eyed, yet flawed, idealist, it was not easy to
get used to him as a prodigal outsider. Small wonder.
In Yashorawaya there is, barring the elder son (played to
perfection by Lucky Dias), no perfect person: even the father (G.
W. Surendra) is a pretender, and the other son (Gamini
Hettiarachchi) is a drunken slob, but with Richards character you
came across a closeted, not so open, but as indulgent a child, so
closeted that upon his exit from the plot you neither knew nor
cared about what happened to him.

He could have graced our cinema more. Could have, but could
not. Like the Lepidoptera of the poem (of the same name) that he
wrote, his broken wings and his crippled mind, which left us on
February 19, 1990, could not be restored.
In that poem he wrote of the ants of time, which carry away
fragile specimens of humanity to be cast aside, forgotten, and
belittled. Such a fate, however, was not to meet Richard: as I
pointed out, his death only empowered his legacy, and his legacy,
which extends not just to the virtually monolingual elite of
Cinnamon Gardens (who, for reasons still unfathomable to me,
have appropriated him as a symbol of lost causes relevant to their
milieu when he was not) but to the rest of this country as well.
Richard de Zoysa, actor, thespian, writer, and journalist continues
to be appropriated and continues to be celebrated. Should we
celebrate or should we not? Is there reason for lament or is there
not? These are, arguably, trivial questions. More important than
any of these is this: has he been forgotten? The simple answer,
no.
Posted by Thavam