In the epilogue to Ernest Thalayasingham MacIntyre’s play Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, the two main characters, Sita and Philip, are in the transit lounge of the Singapore airport, about to board a plane for the last stage of their migration to Australia. Behind them lies the carnage of the Black July pogroms against Tamils in Lanka. The country’s thirty-year war is just beginning as the rebel militias of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) perpetrate a retaliatory massacre on a Sinhala village. Coincidentally, also passing through Singapore airport in the opposite direction on an official visit to the place they have left behind, is then Foreign Minister Bill Hayden. The couple discuss a statement by Hayden in a copy of the Straits Times: “Mr Hayden commented that the killing of innocent Sinhalese civilians by Tamil terrorists … removes the moral edge that the Tamils have been claiming for themselves [following the pogroms]”. Sita, a Tamil, responds, deadpan: it’s good to know that the Australian Foreign Minister is interested in the moral edge, must be a nice place we’re going to.” “Nice or not nice”, Philip rejoins, “what has happened to us will change even that country a little bit” .

Migrants and refugees, the strange shapes and sounds of their bodies, their baggage that reeks of spices and the remains of murdered family members, the stories they will tell you in their barely intelligible accents, all change the countries they have come to, both their pasts and presents, as surely as they are themselves changed by these new places; in turn, their new diasporic selves and stories change the places that they left behind.

The continuous shifting interplay of new and old, then and now, past and possibility, are the spaces in which MacIntyre lived for over half a century after his migration, writing and producing over a dozen plays and books. In these years, while ranging across theatrical forms and aesthetic models, his focus remained consistent: whether in Lanka or Australia, his characters stand at “the moral edge” of cruxes of contemporary nationhood, from migration and ethnic identity to mass violence. Their narratives and memories of what happened to them make their way, unevenly, imperceptibly, into new social spaces, nice and not nice, permanently altering the contours of what was there before.

MacIntyre, who died in December in Sydney, aged ninety-two, belonged to the generation of 1970s migrants from Lanka that preceded my own — a divide marked by the irreversible rupture of the war’s outbreak, in 1983. This earlier cohort was for the most part anglicised, professional and often could documented a white ancestor in their family tree, important in those waning years of White Australia.

MacIntyre’s formation was typical of his generation of anglicised Ceylonese educated at the newly independent country’s first university at Peradeniya. In these idyllic and hopeful surroundings, ethnic distinctions were often subsumed by class, and the fissures that would come to define the country were hardly perceptible — or else quietly overlooked. For some of us who followed them, this select group, highly influential across government, academia and the arts, felt like forbears both intimate and removed: remote in their continuing attachment to the idea of a nation that was no longer possible, yet intimately known in other ways; familiar, like characters from a novel we had read somewhere — say, Running in the Family, the improbable autobiography by MacIntyre’s friend and contemporary, Michael Ondaatje.

MacIntyre’s first Australian play, Let’s Give them Curry (published in the 1980s but set in the period of his family’s own migration a decade earlier) quickly became a staple of multicultural theatre and was adopted into curricula across Australia. I remember reading it in my early years in this country as a type of guidebook to everyday Australianness in its chronicling of migrant dilemmas of assimilation and multiculturalism. In both this broader sense, as well as at a more personal level, MacIntyre was a mentor and elder in my transition to Australian life. Nalini Mather, his lifelong companion, collaborator and muse, had taught me English and Classics at school in Colombo and was influential in my early formation. Dying within a few months of each other, they yet remain generous, kindly mentors, links to another time and place, still transmitting memory and knowledge that I didn’t know I possessed.  

One scene of comedy and tragedy

In his early years MacIntyre was a leading figure in an emergent multiethnic post-independence theatre scene in Lanka. The son of a Tamil father and a Burgher mother, he was enthralled by the new Sinhala drama of the 1950s, notably by the landmark work Maname by Ediriweera Sarachchandra — a work unmistakably animated by postcolonial nationalist energies while being at the same time internationalist in its dialogue with Japanese, Indian and Greek theatrical traditions. The production of Maname in 1956, however, was also concurrent with the rise of another, yet related form of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, one that was ultranationalist and premised on the supremacism of Sinhala Buddhism. This exclusionary nationalism culminated in the introduction of “Sinhala Only” legislation, strongly resisted by Tamil and other linguistic and cultural groups (Muslims, Burghers, Sinhala Christians among others). The 1958 anti-Tamil pogroms that followed — the first of the series of “riots” of Rasanayagam’s Last Riot — sowed the seeds for the Tamil separatist war of the 1980s. In the pogroms of 1958, as later in 1983, citizens who could not or would not recite a stanza of the Buddhist scriptures, or pronounce certain everyday words (“bucket” or “window”) the Sinhala way, were beaten or murdered. Rasanayagam’s Last Riot ends with the report of Rasanayagam being burned alive because he knowingly chooses to say the Tamil word baliya instead of the Sinhala balthiya, thereby refusing to pass as a Sinhalese man and erase his Tamil identity.

Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, which premiered at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney in 1990, marks a point of departure in MacIntyre’s writing, bringing to centre stage questions addressed only obliquely before. His prodigious comedic energies — endlessly inventive linguistic play, delight in punning across English, Sinhala and Tamil and the rumbunctious rhythms of baila in his productions — now combined with a sharper questioning and the search for a dramatic form adequate to the war and violence of the present. The UN Weapons Inspector is a Sri Lankan (2003) adapts a plot from Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1836) to the invasion of Iraq and the continuing war in Lanka. The self-explanatory Antigone in Sri Lanka as Irangani turns to Greek tragedy, opening at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre in 2009, amidst the closing atrocities of the Lankan war. These adaptations of diverse dramatic genres and continuing engagement with Indian and classical aesthetic theories pointedly refuse the insular nationalism characteristic of some postcolonial theatre.

After the early family drama of Let’s Give them Curry, only one of MacIntyre’s productions dealt in any significant way with Lankan lives in Australia. Theatre of Migration, in which I participated as dramaturg and contributor to the script, was collectively authored by a group of diasporic Lankans in Sydney. It opened in 2001, in the highly politicised climate of the Tampa’s arrival, with Lankan, Iraqi and Afghan asylum-seekers on board.

The play began with the real-life narrative of a group of Lankan asylum seekers cast away a few months earlier on the remote coast of Coral Bay, West Australia, only to be reported to the authorities and taken away to indefinite detention when they sought directions to the nearest bus stop (as documented by the Sydney Morning Herald of 20 April 2001). Dressed in suits for prospective job interviews, but with their trouser legs rolled up to wade through the surf, the men represented at once the barefoot castaway refugee and the aspirational migrant. Seventy-odd Lankan nationals were already in detention at the time of the performance, incarcerated in offshore camps along with hundreds of others seeking asylum from Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond these were the shadows of thousands more disappeared and displaced in decades of war in Lanka.

In the paired contexts of war here and there, telling refugee stories triggered layered anxieties among the multiethnic cast. Opposing allegiances in the war mingled with anxieties about behaving like bad guests in our new home and appearing “unAustralian” in dangerous times. Only a brilliant decision by MacIntyre enabled the production to proceed, not by resolving the incompatible political positions among the cast, but by staging them, literally, on a set divided into unequal parts: at one end, the comfortable, suburban domesticity of prosperous, apparently happily assimilated migrants; at the other, the bleak lines and harsh lights of a detention camp where the illegal, unruly and unAustralian were dispatched in the course of the action. Set apart from these two major divides was a small third space, suggesting a café or kitchen table, where a group of rambunctious old men drink arrack, sing baila and reenact the history of Lankan migrants in Australia — a profane, irretrievably obtuse, anti-chorus.

I describe this production in detail as it is the only one of MacIntyre’s with which I was directly involved. Theatre of Migration attempts to represent both the irreconcilable contradictions and enabling paradoxes of embattled migrant and refugee lives. Most significant among these is the paradox of language. Though the wrong word, or even syllable, could prove lethal — as made plain in Rasanayagam’s Last Riot — language is a source of deep pleasure and energy in Theatre of Migration. The multilingual cast sing and dance their way through good times and bad, with words invented and adapted by MacIntyre from sources that include Shakespeare, Irish ballads and of course baila. The character Yorrick in his spin-off, Hamlet and the Diggers A Theatre Piece in One Scene of Comedy and Tragedy, appears to sum up these frolicsome and farcical elements of his plays: “I politely told them that comedy though dancing on the shallows was necessary to allow the depths of tragedy its time to emerge”.

Fabulations

In his last years, as his physical mobility declined, MacIntyre’s imagination ranged ever more widely in space and time. Through plays such as Under the Ola Leaves (2024) and Manimekali (2023), reworkings of Sinhala and Tamil epics, he grafted new stories onto ancient myths and legends. These “fabulations,” as he called them, developed alternatives to the bloody closures and dead ends of the past. Under the Ola Leaves reimagines the Sinhala originary myth of Vijaya, in which the imagined founder of the Sinhala race murders his father who is part-lion, part-human. In MacIntyre’s fabulation this patricide is an act of compassion. Manimekali is another fabulation drawn from the great Tamil epics Sillapadikaram and Manimekhalai. In the character of the exiled princess Manimekali MacIntyre imagines a subject impossible to contemplate in present day nationalist historiographies: the Tamil Buddhist.

In both these late plays MacIntyre’s dramatic and historical imagination soars, as it does also in his final work, found on his computer by his children after his death. This last play, provisionally titled Galilei, is a time-travelling reflection on scientific ethnocentrism and the origins of the concept of zero/nothingness in Indian mathematics. In addition to Galileo and his daughter, the cast of characters includes Bertolt Brecht, Pope John Paul 2, the 6^th century Indian astronomer Aryabatta and a humble Lankan nun assigned to wait on Jean Paul 2. The script evidences the audacity of MacIntyre’s theatrical imagination at the very end of his life, a literal reaching for the stars to rework relations below.

Reading Australia from Lanka and Lanka from Australia, MacIntyre is an artist who made new cultural and social landscapes visible — spaces that Lankan Australians might take as a springboard for our own writings of the war and its legacies. The mainstream success of Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin-winning novel, Teatime at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) and S Shakthidaran’s 2019 play Counting and Cracking are two instances that write the Lankan war and its aftermath into Australia’s cultural landscape. Although MacIntyre’s work may not have achieved these same levels of public recognition, he is a key precursor for these artists. Collectively their works represent the fulfilment of Philip’s prediction to Sita: “Nice or not nice, what has happened to us will change even that country a little bit.”

Side by side with this achievement, are two others that, I feel certain, would have gratified him even more in the last weeks of his life: the completion of the first Sinhala translation of Rasanayagam’s Last Riot by Chitra Jayathilaka, an achievement unimaginable in the hitherto pervasive climate of Sinhala ultranationalism. Second, in December 2025 Manimekali, his fabulation of a “Tamil Buddhist” was translated into Tamil by Navadharshani Karunaharan and performed at the University of Jaffna, in the Tamil capital. Photographs of this beautiful production, shown to MacIntyre on his deathbed by his children, realize a subject unthinkable in exclusionary nationalist ideologies that identify “Buddhist” with “Sinhala” and “Hindu” with “Tamil.” Manimekali thus represents the culmination of a consistent and determined vision actualized through an act of profound historical and theatrical imagination. These translations into Sinhala and Tamil of MacIntyre’s works in English cannot but be read as hopeful indications for the future, enabling Lankans to reread and reimagine their intermingled stories.

They were passing waves,
sparkling and shining
on the top, in their time,
held up by other meanings
deep below,
waiting for their own
unforeseen surface.

(From Hamlet and the Diggers A Theatre Piece in One Scene of Comedy and Tragedy by Ernest MacIntyre)

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Amrit and Raina, the children of Nalini and Ernest MacIntyre, for their help with sources. Thanks also to Dr Navadharshani Karunaharan, Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Jaffna for permission to reproduce a photo from her production. Sydney Kolam Maduwa, the theatre group formed by Ernest MacIntyre, is now defunct, but their website remains live and I have drawn from it with thanks to the remaining members.

Published works by Ernest MacIntyre cited in this article

Let’s Give Them Curry: An Austral-Asian comedy in three acts. Melbourne: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1985, © 1981
Rasanayagam’s Last Riot. Sydney: Wordlink 1993 © 1990
Three Plays for Reading: A Statue for Manimekali A Story of Sinhala and Tamil Buddhism. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa 2023
“Hamlet and the Diggers A Theatre Piece in One Scene of Comedy and Tragedy” in Three Plays for Reading: A Statue for Manimekali A Story of Sinhala and Tamil Buddhism. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa 2023
“Under the Ola Leaves” in A Bend in the Mahaweli Colombo: Vijitha Yapa 2024.