[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":226},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-tower-hall-1911":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":197,"description":198,"era":199,"extension":200,"featured":201,"heroImage":202,"imageCredit":203,"imageLicense":204,"imageSource":205,"meta":206,"navigation":207,"path":208,"rawYear":209,"seo":210,"sources":211,"stem":224,"translated":207,"url":214,"__hash__":225},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Ftower-hall-1911.md","Tower Hall, 6 December 1911",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":187},"minimark",[9,18,21,26,41,44,48,51,64,68,88,95,98,102,124,136,139,143,152,155,165,168,172,184],[10,11,12,13,17],"p",{},"On the morning of 6 December 1911, at an hour chosen as auspicious, Anagarika Dharmapala opened a new building on Panchikawatta Road in Maradana, beside the railway line. That evening the Governor, Sir Henry McCallum, took his seat in it to watch ",[14,15,16],"em",{},"Pandukabhaya",", written and produced by Charles Dias. Sri Lanka had a proper theatre — a stage with curtains that drew, a balcony, dressing rooms — for the first time.",[10,19,20],{},"Everything about that day is a small compression of the period. A Buddhist revivalist cuts the ribbon in the morning; the King's representative is applauded in the evening; the play is about a legendary Sinhala king; the building is modelled on a theatre in Bombay.",[22,23,25],"h2",{"id":24},"forty-tin-sheds","Forty tin sheds",[10,27,28,29,32,33,36,37,40],{},"To see why it mattered, you have to know what it replaced. By the first decade of the twentieth century there were something like forty playhouses in Maradana and Pettah, and almost none of them was a theatre. They were sheds — wooden or, more often, roofed in galvanised sheeting, which is why people called them ",[14,30,31],{},"belek"," halls or ",[14,34,35],{},"takarang"," halls, tin halls. The \"Kala Korner\" column in the ",[14,38,39],{},"Sunday Times"," names some of them: the Pavilion Theatre at Maradana junction, the Public Hall at the Ibbanwela junction in Hunupitiya, Saraswathy Hall in Pettah, Madhuramnaambika Hall at Gintupitiya.",[10,42,43],{},"They were full every night, because there was nothing else. No cinema, no radio, and — for those who could pay — an appetite for theatre that had been building for twenty years. John de Silva had been writing and staging plays throughout that time and drawing large crowds; so had Charles Dias.",[22,45,47],{"id":46},"the-man-who-built-it","The man who built it",[10,49,50],{},"The land on Panchikawatta Road belonged to G. D. Hendrik Seneviratna of Heiyantuduwa, near Kelaniya, who had been leasing it as a park for horse-carts. His third son Edmund, a theatre enthusiast, talked him into building a hall on it. Work began in 1909 and finished in 1911. It was built on the model of the Grand Theatre in Bombay — the same city the Parsi companies had come from — and it got its name from the clock tower attached to it, which is why Colombo has always simply called the place \"the Tower\".",[10,52,53,54,56,57,60,61,63],{},"Even the details of the building are contested. Saparamadu says the tower copies the tower of London's Tower Bridge; the ",[14,55,39],{}," column and ",[14,58,59],{},"Lanka Pradeepa"," say it was raised on the lines of the Tower of London. On capacity, Saparamadu gives 1,500 seats, while the ",[14,62,39],{}," gives 800 seated with room for 400 more to stand at the sides. Nobody disputes that it also had provision to screen films, which turned out to matter.",[22,65,67],{"id":66},"the-rivalry-and-the-folklore-around-it","The rivalry, and the folklore around it",[10,69,70,71,73,74,77,78,77,81,77,84,87],{},"Hendrik Seneviratna's son-in-law was Charles Dias. That is why ",[14,72,16],{}," opened the house, and it is why for years afterwards the bill was mostly Dias — ",[14,75,76],{},"Padmavathy",", ",[14,79,80],{},"Sivamma Dhanapala",[14,82,83],{},"Alladin Saha Puduma Pahana",[14,85,86],{},"Mayawathy"," — with a play every evening.",[10,89,90,91,94],{},"Dias's chief rival was John de Silva, and it is often told that de Silva's plays were kept off the Tower Hall stage for years because of the family connection, even as \"a Tower Hall play\" became the ordinary Sinhala phrase for a ",[14,92,93],{},"nurthi"," of exactly de Silva's kind. That story should be treated as folklore. It is not in the accounts used here, and Saparamadu's own version says only that \"later John de Silva's plays too were staged here, and other dramatists brought their own plays to the Tower.\" What is documented is the rivalry and the marriage; the boycott is a story about them.",[10,96,97],{},"The irony survives either way. The John de Silva Memorial Theatre, built in 1987 behind the Art Gallery, is named for the dramatist. The Tower is named for a clock.",[22,99,101],{"id":100},"what-it-sounded-like","What it sounded like",[10,103,104,105,107,108,110,111,115,116,119,120,123],{},"The Tower Hall's quarter-century was the peak of ",[14,106,93],{},", and ",[14,109,93],{}," was a musical form. The songs were set to melodies out of the Parsi theatre and, later, to melodies written on North Indian ragas — John de Silva paid the western Indian musician Visvanath Lawjee to come to Colombo and compose them, staging their collaborations between 1903 and 1909. The most famous of them, ",[112,113,114],"strong",{},"දන්නෝ බුදුන්ගේ"," ",[14,117,118],{},"Danno Budunge",", was written for ",[14,121,122],{},"Sirisangabo Charitaya"," in 1903, eight years before the Tower opened, and was sung there for decades afterwards.",[10,125,126,127,129,130,132,133,135],{},"This was also the moment when Sinhala theatre song became Sinhala recorded music. Garrett Field's account is blunt about the mechanism: a few years after ",[14,128,118],{}," premiered, talent scouts from His Master's Voice, Odeon and Parlophone came knocking at de Silva's door, having decided that ",[14,131,93],{}," songs were the most marketable thing on the island. Nearly every record released in Ceylon between 1906 and 1930 was a song from the ",[14,134,93],{}," stage. A gramophone in the parlour became a status symbol, and what it played was the Tower Hall repertoire.",[10,137,138],{},"The theatre made stars, too, and notably women — the actresses Annie Boteju and Luxmibai became household names, at a period when public performance by women was widely held to be incompatible with respectability.",[22,140,142],{"id":141},"cinema-and-then-theatre-again","Cinema, and then theatre again",[10,144,145,146,148,149,151],{},"The end came quickly. Hendrik Seneviratna died in December 1929; the management struggled after him, and a severe flood swept through Maradana in 1930. The ",[14,147,39],{}," column treats the flood as the death knell for plays at the Tower. Saparamadu dates the decline a little later, to the mid-1930s, and gives fuller reasons: the movies arrived, new companies like the Minerva Players were staging plays on contemporary themes that made the Tower's historical dramas and dramatised Jataka stories look old, and Maradana itself was becoming a crowded commercial district that the leisured classes stopped visiting. Attempts just after independence to revive the ",[14,150,93],{}," repertoire there failed.",[10,153,154],{},"So the Tower became a cinema. Ceylon Theatres bought it from a private owner, and there it stayed — the building standing, the clock striking the hours, the stage dark — for more than four decades.",[10,156,157,158,161,162,164],{},"It came back through the state. The government took it over in March 1978 on the initiative of the Prime Minister, Ranasinghe Premadasa; the Tower Hall Theatre Foundation was created the same year by Act of Parliament, with a mandate to promote national theatre, and the hall was rebuilt and re-equipped, partly with a Japanese cultural grant. It reopened as a theatre in September 1979 with ",[14,159,160],{},"Siri Sangabo",", produced by Henry Jayasena — the same king John de Silva had dramatised in 1903, in the play that had given the island ",[14,163,118],{},".",[10,166,167],{},"It never regained what it had. Sinhala theatre's centre of gravity had moved in the 1950s to the Lumbini hall in Havelock Town, and later to the John de Silva Theatre and the Punchi Theatre in Borella. But the Tower still stands on Panchikawatta Road with its clock, and it is still the building where a Sinhala play was first performed in a room built for the purpose.",[22,169,171],{"id":170},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,173,174,175,177,178,180,181,183],{},"The opening date, Dharmapala, McCallum, ",[14,176,16],{},", the builder and his son-in-law come from Sumana Saparamadu's account, written for the Virtual Library and reprinted at Sri Lankan Theatre; the tin halls, the seating figures, the 1929 death and the 1930 flood are from the \"Kala Korner\" column in the ",[14,179,39],{}," of 14 July 2013; the Tower Hall Theatre Foundation Act of 1978 is recorded by ",[14,182,59],{},". The gramophone material is Garrett Field's.",[10,185,186],{},"Two details differ between sources and are given both ways above: the clock tower's model (Tower Bridge or the Tower of London) and the capacity (1,500 seats, or 800 seats plus 400 standing). One thing that is widely repeated but not supported by any of these accounts is the claim that John de Silva's plays were barred from the Tower for years out of family loyalty to Charles Dias. It is a good story, and it may well be true; it is presented here as the oral tradition it is, and not as fact.",{"title":188,"searchDepth":189,"depth":189,"links":190},"",2,[191,192,193,194,195,196],{"id":24,"depth":189,"text":25},{"id":46,"depth":189,"text":47},{"id":66,"depth":189,"text":67},{"id":100,"depth":189,"text":101},{"id":141,"depth":189,"text":142},{"id":170,"depth":189,"text":171},"institution","Sri Lanka's first purpose-built theatre opened one morning under Anagarika Dharmapala and, that same evening, staged a play before the Governor. The man who built it had backed the wrong dramatist — or so the story goes.","1900s-1930s","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Ftower-hall-1911.webp","Tower Hall Theatre Foundation","Unverified — fallback source","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.towerhall.lk\u002F",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Ftower-hall-1911",1911,{"title":5,"description":198},[212,215,218,221],{"title":213,"url":214},"Sumana Saparamadu, 'Tower Hall: Theatre for many stage plays' — reprinted at Sri Lankan Theatre","https:\u002F\u002Fsrilankantheatre.blogspot.com\u002F2010\u002F01\u002Ftower-hall-theatre-for-many-stage-plays.html",{"title":216,"url":217},"'Kala Korner' by Dee Cee, 'Wanted: a proper home for Sinhala theatre' — Sunday Times, 14 July 2013","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F130714\u002Fplus\u002Fwanted-a-proper-home-for-sinhala-theatre-52432.html",{"title":219,"url":220},"Tower Hall Theatre — Lanka Pradeepa","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.lankapradeepa.com\u002F2022\u002F08\u002Ftower-hall-theatre.html",{"title":222,"url":223},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211","en\u002Fstories\u002Ftower-hall-1911","DVRa_r7dGN_v1uVC78lsknTKBaXIdw2xwxeNlAN3XV8",1787999338266]