Ipswich-born Prasanna Puwanarajah is something of a Renaissance Man. He studied medicine at Oxford University and worked as a doctor for three-and-a-half years before opting to make a complete change and train as an actor.
He gained work with the Royal National Theatre before taking another sidestep into writing and directing short films and a drama for Channel Four.
Now, as part of Halesworth’s HighTide Festival, he is making his debut as a theatre director and is staging a new work, Moth, which he hopes will be entered into The Edinburgh Festival and then find its way into a London theatre.
Prasanna said that although he had directed small-scale plays before, this was the first time he had been invited to helm a full-length professional production.
“I have previously done some theatre directing in the past, at a fairly low grade level, but then I moved into film-making two or three years ago. I directed a couple of short films, including The Half Light with Henry Goodman and David Haig, and then last year I directed Spoof or Die, one of the ‘Coming Up’ films for Channel Four, and it was while we were in the edit that the opportunity to do this play first appeared.
“Our film was actually very well received and we ended up in a lot of ‘critic’s choice’ columns in the newspaper because we were screened two days after the opening of the Olympics. We were the alternative choice. Many of them were saying ‘if you don’t want to watch swimming or gymnastics, then how about this great little film about life in East Belfast?’ – which was great for us.”
He said that after having worked in film and television for a couple of years, he felt it was time to get back into theatre again.
“I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it because most theatre directors are in constant conversation with writers about new plays that they are developing and they are all competing to get them into a workshop on production, or in front of artistic directors of theatres.
“I was puzzling over how best to get back into theatre when HighTide phoned and they said they were looking to appoint new associate directors – people who they want to work with – people who they want to look through new plays, plays that they have been sent or plays from other places, helping to broaden the reach of the company.
“I was working with them, doing a bit of play reading and searching around, really – seeing who was doing what. I came across Moth in a slightly unusual way. Declan Greene is an Australian playwright. He’s young. He’s in his mid- to late 20s. He’s just devised and directed a show for the Sydney Theatre Company, which is Cate Blanchett’s company in Australia, so he’s doing really well. They commissioned him to write something that would appeal to younger audiences and try and shake things up a bit, and Moth was the result.” Moth tells the story of a Goth and a geek: school friends meeting in the afterlife. The story is set in a strange sort of limbo.
Prasanna describes the setting as a strange narrative space which is part story, part illusion, part imagination, part aspiration. It’s about two people trying to piece together the events that led to a tragedy in each of their lives.
“It’s the story of two 15-year-old kids who exist at the margins of their school and it lends itself quite well to being staged in quite a sparse way. It also lends itself to being done in the round.
“Plays like this focus heavily on the actors and their relationship with the characters and with each other. So you don’t really want to worry where the audience is, what the set is going to be, are we going to have scene changes here? You want to create a world which allows the actors to work and the character exist.
“Everything you add, you want it to be in service of the play. It’s a work which celebrates a free and easy imagination. The settings vary from the homes of these kids to a gorgeous flood-lit playing field.
“Then one of the characters meets a 100-foot armour-plated robot, while another is trapped in a diving suit on the sea bed, unable to move because of the weight of water pressing down on her. There are all sorts of images which are brought into play which the audience can help summon up.”
He has described the set to the lighting designer as a black fantasia – very simple – onto which the imagination of actors and audience can run riot.
“Our lighting designer, Jack Knowles, has come up with a wonderful lighting system which is known as pixel mapping – which, in our case, is wiring together 420 lightbulbs so they form one great grid and you can play low-resolution video through these lightbulbs and you can see the picture being given off by this array of bulbs.
“This is the only thing which is at the beck and call of these characters and it mirrors their collective and individual imaginations.”
Wearing his film-maker’s hat, he said that lighting was nine-tenths of making a movie and telling a story. Lighting helped build atmosphere and encouraged audiences to use their imaginations.
“Moth really is a firework of a play. It’s a fast, funny and heartbreaking story about two young people with perhaps nowhere to go. Everything is played out on stage in front of an audience.
“It’s described as a black comedy and there is a very fine line between the laughter and the tears in the very best black comedies, and Moth genuinely is one of those plays.
“It is very sparky and yet at the same time it is very truthful and humane. It is anchored in the relationship between these two characters who have an easy familiarity with each other, from which the humour and the truthfulness flows.”
He said that Declan has not only not had any work staged in Britain, Moth also represents his European premiere.
“People were aware of him – aware of his reputation – but no-one had actually staged any of his work until now. “What we are offering audiences who come and see the show at HighTide is an opportunity to see an incredible young talent make his debut in the UK.
“Declan has an incredible voice. The interesting thing about Moth is that it is a play of 17 scenes, but Declan has written an 18th scene which is optional. Declan is coming over to Britain a week before we put it on and we are going to spend some time re-focusing the play for Britain.
Prasanna is thrilled that he getting to direct the play, because he says that a lot of work in the arts and in theatre involves searching for new work, talking to writers, developing work, and it either comes to nothing or is handed over to someone else to direct the actual production.
“I am delighted that Steven and HighTide have faith in me to give me the job.”
He said much of his excitement about doing it was generated by the fact that this was an original piece of work.
“I read a lot of new plays and I have never come across anything quite like this – not in its tone or in its peculiar structure and language. It’s something new.”
He said the strength of HighTide was that it was a theatre festival rooted in the locality which involved the whole town, that staged events throughout Halesworth and yet staged plays like Moth that dealt with universal themes, as well as plays like last year’s Mudlarks, which was very much born out of concerns and events in the region.
“HighTide is very much concerned with making great theatre in East Anglia – but with international connections that I am sure will continue to grow.” He feels he has come full circle as he was born in Ipswich Hospital in 1981 and spent his early years living in the town, where his father was a dentist.
“We lived in Churchill Avenue until I was about four and then we moved to Hampshire. My dad is incredibly proud of Ipswich Town Football Club – particularly the Bobby Robson years. There is an enormous softspot in my family for Ipswich.
“My mum does prison psychiatry now and she used to work at the old St Audrey’s.
“My parents came from Sri Lanka, we are Tamils, and Ipswich was where we settled and put down roots in Britain. They made a lot of friends in Ipswich at quite a difficult time in their lives.
“Ipswich was a safe haven. Dad was working as an emergency hospital dentist for the NHS – travelling all over – he was trying to find jobs all over. He worked in London for a bit, he worked in Norwich, Ipswich, King’s Lynn. What persuaded him to move in the end was having to do a weekly commute from Ipswich to Bristol. He loved living in Ipswich but that was just too much. He just got too familiar with the M4.”
He said his own drive and desire to perform is something of a mystery. There were some musicians and artists in his extended family but it couldn’t really be described as a family trait. “My parents are not from a theatrical world at all.
“I think it’s a combination of things. I was a student for a very long time, training to be a doctor, and I just enjoyed doing plays. It was quite straightforward for me then. It was a fun and thought-provoking way to spend time outside of training.
“After four or five years it became clear to me this was very, very important. It wasn’t something I was going to be able to say goodbye to. I did come to it quite late but I found that there is something quite diagnostic about theatre, about finding out about people and characters.
“In my head, theatre occupies the same space as a doctor asking questions about a person’s lifestyle, habits, what makes up them who they are. There’s a nosiness about doctors that I find attractive – asking people about their homelife, their concerns, expectations. People talk to doctors about everything and they may have just walked in through the door.
“In rehearsal room you can be asking similar questions about characters in a play or, just as likely, just as a doctor would, asking yourself ‘What aren’t they saying?’”
He said that working in theatre and film was the equivalent of seeing 30 patients in an afternoon. He remains insatiably curious about people and what makes them tick, and is something he finds impossible to give up.
“I worked as a doctor for just over three years and I was just going to take a little sabbatical, and essentially I never went back.
“So it wasn’t a push away from the health service; it was more of a strong pull towards something else, and ended up being something that I couldn’t really return from.”
He has thought long and hard about whether he has made the right choices and has decided that providing he can face the 80-year-old version of himself, and say that he has lived life to the full, then he can’t complain.
“I look at it this way – that six years of training and three years of practice represents nine years of life.”
n The European premiere of Moth will be held at Halesworth Rifle Hall, as part of the HighTide Festival, on May 2. It runs until May 10.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here