Introduction

In his book Masculinities, sociologist R.W. Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as “a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture” (Masculinities 71). Connell argues that

any one masculinity, as a configuration of practice, is simultaneously positioned in a number of structures of relationship, which may be following different historical trajectories. Accordingly masculinity, like femininity, is always liable to internal contradiction and historical disruption. (Masculinities 73)

Connell here alludes to numerous “masculinities,” and each is constructed in a particular social context, in a particular historical moment, and across notions of race, class, and ethnicity (Masculinities; see also Morrell). This means that masculinity is fluid and that it “can and does change—it is not a fixed essential which all men have” (Morrell 4). It follows then that any given context is likely to comprise various masculinities operating simultaneously, some more powerful and visible than others. Indeed, Connell makes the point that “one of the key reasons why masculinities are not fixed is that they are not homogeneous, simple states of being. Close-focus research on masculinities commonly identifies contradictory desires and conduct” (The Men and the Boys 13). Thus, in the words of Paul Kirby and Marsha Henry, “disjunctures, slippages and paradoxes” emerge “in the performance of masculinity. Attempts to articulate a particular form of masculinity fail, remain partial or appear as always in process, part of more-or-less conscious projects of national identity making” and of other means of exerting social or political power (447). In his discussion of Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, Demetrakis Z. Demetriou reports that “men control the means of institutionalized power such as the state or the army, while the structure of cathexis [i.e. emotional attachment] is characterized by male superiority and violence rather than reciprocity and intimacy” (341). This is particularly evident in what Connell calls “gender regimes” such as “the labor market, the state, and the family” (Demetriou 341). “Within this framework,” Demetriou continues, “hegemonic masculinity is understood as a configuration of practice but it is also seen as being institutionalized in large-scale gender regimes, that is, as a process that involves both social structure and personal life” (341).

A by-product of institutionalized power within these regimes is violence—“the negative side of conventional masculine identities” (Bozkurt, Tartanoglu, and Dawes 255). Since armies—mostly made up of men—engage in war, “ordinary war” is largely “a male-male affair, and the threat is of being defeated or humiliated by other men” (Chodorow 256). In a similar vein, Neloufer De Mel, echoing Cynthia Enloe, posits that “war is a paradigmatic masculine enterprise, and that masculinity as an idea is what benefits the most from militarization” (De Mel 25, based on Enloe 133). Kimberly Hutchings expands on this connection between war and masculinity:

qualities such as aggression, rationality, or physical courage are identified both as an essential component of war and also of masculinity at a given place or time … war plays a special role in anchoring the concept of masculinity, providing a fixed reference point for any negotiation or renegotiation of what masculinity or, in particular, hegemonic masculinity may mean. (389–90, italics in original)

The valorization and over-emphasis of such hegemonic masculinities and of attendant values such as camaraderie, honour, and glory frame propagandist narratives and conceal the horrors of war.

These interconnections between war, masculinity, and violence are emphasized in two popular Sri Lankan plays, Delon Weerasinghe’s Thicker than Blood (2006) and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke’s Only Soldiers (2014). Thicker than Blood is situated within the landscape of the prolonged armed ethnic conflict (1983–2009) between the Sri Lankan State and Tamil separatist groups. Only Soldiers was inspired by Michael Tomlinson’s The Most Dangerous Moment: Japanese Assault on Ceylon, 1942 (1976), when the Japanese fleet attacked naval bases in Ceylon during the Second World War. Within the context of the Anglophone theatre tradition in Sri Lanka, the plays can be placed within a body of work consisting of a marginal number of texts that self-consciously position themselves as deviating from the theatrical norms to unveil the exigencies of war to middle-class English-speaking audiences, who were predominantly shielded from the seamy side of the prolonged conflict.

This chapter interrogates the plays to determine to what extent they challenge or reinforce the dominant expectations of the soldier and the ways in which violence contributes or complicates gender relations. The chapter also shows how, simultaneously, these plays expose the fissures within the discourses that predicate the expectations around the figure of the soldier. My analysis is framed within theoretical discourses that underpin the nexus between masculinity, war, and violence. A brief plot outline is followed by an engagement with the thematic preoccupations which render visible this nexus, and with the challenges involved in attempting to depict a nuanced perspective of conflict on stage.

Thicker than Blood alternates between two temporal spaces. Two scenes are set in the jungle on two consecutive days in May 2000, when intense fighting occurred. In the first of these scenes, Suresh, a Sinhalese soldier, injured in battle, is pitted against a civilian—an old Tamil man, who rescues Suresh. Weerasinghe later interweaves into the play another scene with the Old Man, which interrupts the trajectory of the events that subsequently take place within the domestic realm. In this scene, Sinhalese soldiers come and take Suresh away from the battlefield and while doing so, kill the Old Man. The rest of the play centres on Suresh, struggling to come to terms with physical disability resulting from his injury. He resides in his brother Harsha’s house, while engaging in a clandestine relationship with Harsha’s wife, Maithrey. These events occur against the backdrop of the build-up to Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections of 2001. Suresh is manipulated by Harsha and their uncle, Kithsiri, in the latter two men’s attempt to co-opt Suresh into their political agenda, while Maithrey and Dinesh (Harsha’s son) also become embroiled in the political machinations of the older men.

Only Soldiers, set in an observational airbase at Koggala, Ceylon, in 1942, charts the frustrations of four allied airmen (Jack, Lenny, Charles, and Godfrey) of various nationalities, while they wait to be called up for active combat. Through fast-paced dialogue, vigorous action, and auditory effects, the airmen’s escalating impatience gets channelled into demonstrations of aggression against each other. The aim of Only Soldiers, as stated in the theatre programme when the play was performed in 2015, was “not to focus on the pomp and fanfare but the human cost” (Mind Adventures Theatre Company). Only Soldiers attempts to navigate the dynamics of how war develops by focusing on the experiences of individual soldiers.

Manliness, Violence, and the Myth of War

Both plays foreground the character of the soldier. In Only Soldiers, all four male characters are soldiers. In Thicker than Blood, the protagonist, Suresh, is a disabled soldier. In the latter play, attempts to destabilize the hegemonic masculine ideal embodied in the soldier is captured in several compelling moments. The opening scene, overlaid with auditory effects of gunfire and explosions, firmly establishes the setting—the immediate aftermath of battle. Suresh, the injured soldier, is presented as vulnerable and at the mercy of the civilian Old Man. This scene portrays war as a site for the performance of violence, aggression, and dominance. Even if Suresh is physically debilitated, the abusive language he deploys in his dialogue with the Old Man is a shocking enactment of the verbal violence that becomes normalized in war. Suresh’s initial absence of humanity towards the Old Man embodies, through the linguistic medium, the violence that frames the militarized landscape as a whole: “We are fighting terrorists. Violence is the only language they understand” (Thicker 4).

This binary of self/other (enemy) defines the relationship between Suresh and the Old Man, as well as Suresh’s performance of hegemonic masculinity:

We’re in the middle of a battlefield. What do you do? Huh? Do you fuck them in the ass? Daddy’s little soldier boy? What? Do you jerk off all over them? Huh? What, you were going to jerk off all over me too? Go ahead. Or you waiting for me to die? (Thicker 3)

The soldier’s explicit deployment of intimidating sexual language here corresponds with “a new martial stereotype” that emerged in the twentieth century: soldiers that were like “machine[s],” men whose “language was said to be choppy as the rattle of a machine gun” (Mosse 124). Such soldiers “found their emotional release in battle, drunk on blood and mad with rage … manliness surpassed itself” (124). According to Mosse, this “transcendence entailed not the repression of sexuality but its redirection” (124), as “young men channelled their sexuality into aggression against the enemy” (125). Enlisting in war putatively absorbed a man’s sexual drive and his eroticism, and was regarded as “an instrument of personal and national regeneration, transcending the sexual instinct and exalting the instinct for aggression and battle” (117).

For an Anglophone theatre audience in Sri Lanka, such evocative language was a stark revelation of a narrative eschewed in popular and political discourses that either overlooked or glamourized the unsavoury realities of conflict. The aggression encoded in the sexual overtones captures how the soldier strives to secure conventional power dynamics between soldier and civilian. Even in his debilitated state, Suresh’s disavowal of humaneness reflects how, as mentioned above, he regards the Old Man solely as the “enemy/other.” This essentialist standpoint is further reinforced in an ensuing question to the Old Man: “Do you know how your people kill babies?” (Thicker 3). This brutal challenge serves to legitimize Suresh’s distrust and aggression, which are then subverted by the Old Man’s revelation of having been tortured—being burnt “in the same place” with cigarettes by other soldiers—during interrogation (Thicker 3). All these tactics of violence—be they enacted in Suresh’s verbal abuse towards the Old Man, in his stereotyping of Tamils, or in the physical abuse suffered by the Old Man at the hands of Suresh’s colleagues—are concomitant with the role of hegemonic masculinity in war, regardless of which “camp” is being described.

Similar stereotypes of masculinity are made visible in the opening scene of Only Soldiers, when each of the four allied airmen adopt a highly stylized military pose (of standing to attention) and declare (in an overtly declamatory delivery in performance) their rationale for becoming soldiers to the audience. This visual enactment of militarization, captured through the rigidity of the physical body, resonates with the discipline demanded of the soldier. The stock statements made by the men—“I come from a clan of warriors and I will see that legacy through,” “There is honour in battle,” “It is my duty,” “To see God’s work done,” and “I will come back a hero” (Only Soldiers 1)—are reiterations of the “myth of war.” The valorization of honour, duty, adventure, camaraderie, freedom, belonging, and being a warrior is located in what Mosse notes is the glorification of war. War discourses in Sri Lanka have been grounded upon such subtexts that function to advance the enlisting of young men into the war effort. Deployed by both the State and the separatists, and though compelling, the exaltation of these attributes contributed, as mentioned above, to an erasure of what “going to war” actually entails (see Mauneguru; Silva; De Mel). The reality of “going to war,” as I will further show, gains purchase within the plays.

Both plays blatantly demonstrate the correlation between manliness and war. In Only Soldiers, Jack claims that “A man is not truly a man until he has been to war” (2). This line is followed by a series of dialogues replete with masculinist tropes, and which lead to verbal and physical altercations between the soldiers. The subtexts determine notions of “manliness” associated with the soldier-figure which define their sense of self. For instance, Charles challenges Jack by telling him that “You set up to teach me what a soldier should or shouldn’t do—You don’t know the first thing, you fuck” (Only Soldiers 16). This verbal assault provokes a violent, physical response from Jack: “(Grabbing Charles’s head) You know what I see when I look at you? A fucking waste” (Only Soldiers 16). Charles’s rage is an articulation of the inability to enact a soldier’s predetermined identity. The ensuing aggression reinforces the performativity of “manliness,” which demands physical violence.

At the denouement of the play, the airmen are left to infer that Lenny, who was called upon to fly one of the planes, is killed in the fierce air battle (sounds of which are enacted on stage). The narrative of his death is also inscribed within the vocabulary of “manly” heroism: “He’s a hero for God’s sake” (Only Soldiers 19). When the others attempt to “mourn” their dead comrade, the only way in which “mourning” is permitted entails making arrangements for his funeral, which is presented as a clinical act that precludes any emotional investment. Charles verbalizes the harsh reality of war in the final line: “Now, let’s get on with it. It’s another day, boys. It’s another day” (Only Soldiers 19)—an implication that masculinity in war is predicated on the ability to “get on with it.” The denial of a space to mourn individually reinforces this conventional norm. The play thus illustrates Mosse’s idea that, in war situations, the only grieving allowed is a type of collective mourning alloyed with the feeling of pride and whereby sacrifice is seen as a “noble cause” (Mosse 6).

The idea of war as being “noble” is brought to crisis in Thicker than Blood. The dialogue between Suresh and his young nephew Dinesh about the latter’s ambition to join the army stages how war functions as “an invitation to manliness” (Mosse 144) and forcefully captures Dinesh’s romanticized view of war. The young man appeals to Suresh to help him enlist in the army, but when his uncle poses a series of questions, followed by “Congratulations. You’re in the army,” Dinesh betrays his naiveté in his response: “Don’t joke, Sudu. What will they really ask? … They won’t ask any serious questions?” (Thicker 52). This response resonates with George Mosse’s notion of the myth of war, which “managed to obliterate the horror and heightened the glory” (115). Suresh’s experience on the battlefield and acute knowledge of its horrors dismantles the myth. However, even as Suresh attempts (unsuccessfully) to disrupt the idealized view held by his nephew, it also reveals that, as a child himself, Suresh embraced similar illusions. As Nimasha Malalasekera argues, in recounting the respect that Suresh’s father enjoyed as an army officer,

it is possible to argue that this myth of war—that war is an opportunity to prove manhood—is transformed from generation to generation from Suresh’s father to Suresh and from Suresh to Dinesh not because it is explicitly stated or expressed but because viewing war as [a] space for the construction and performance of hegemonic masculinity becomes a part of the male child’s socialization. (2)

The menace of war is underscored by the dis-ease created in the progression of questions, provoking confusion and anger in the boy. Confronting this brutality enables the audience to probe the implications of conflict situations and its transactional value, chillingly encoded in Suresh’s critical statement: “There isn’t another word for killing just because it’s war” (Thicker 55).

Another key linkage between war and masculinity that both plays render visible is how power and violence are legitimized in war. According to Bozkurt et al. (relying on Holt and Ellis), “male violence can … be seen as [an] expression of power which reinforces a person’s masculinity” (259). Quoting Lewis’s assertion that “men are expected to be tough,” Bozkurt et al. further make the point that “violence is an accepted part of masculinity” (259). This link emerges in several moments in Weerasinghe’s play. In the first scene with the Old Man, there are implicit references to the exertion of violence and aggression in manifold ways in the theatre of war, such as torture mechanisms (Thicker 4).

This juxtaposition serves as a stark reminder of the correlation between power and violence, foregrounded through language and action, in the argument that the Old Man and Suresh have over the fate of a wounded soldier who stumbles onto the stage. Suresh is cast as devoid of any humanity, in his attitude towards the man when Suresh identifies him as the “enemy.” He threatens to kill both the wounded soldier and the Old Man by seizing the former’s gun: “I’m not joking old man. Get away from that bastard or I’ll shoot you as well. Don’t think I won’t do it” (Thicker 32). The violence of language is then transferred onto the “real” with the shooting of the Old Man by a soldier from Suresh’s regiment. At that point, Suresh’s reaction, when he learns of the Old Man’s death, undermines the hegemonic masculinity that governs the stereotype of the soldier. The façade of “ruthlessness” is subverted: “The old man. He’s not a terrorist. He saved my life” (Thicker 36). This can be construed as an epiphanic moment for Suresh, which underpins the trajectory of the crucial episode in the play between him and Dinesh, where, as previously mentioned, the latter expresses his desire to join the army and asks his uncle to help him to “prepare for the recruitment” (Thicker 52). The exchange between uncle and nephew is enabling in opening up a space for a nuanced reading of violence within conflict.

Dinesh’s explanation in Thicker than Blood for why he wants to enlist is that “nobody tells you what to do” (Thicker 51). According to Malalasekera, Dinesh’s reaction can be construed as an affirmation that “war is a site that enables the assertion of power and dominance associated with hegemonic masculinity” (1). Dinesh’s notion of “power” seamlessly produces a nexus with violence, made evident in his avowal: “You think I can’t handle killing a man. You’re wrong” (Thicker 55). Suresh’s persistent questions, such as “Could you take a gun, point it at someone and pull the trigger?” (Thicker 53), escalate the tension between the two characters; they also foreground Kirby and Henry’s statement about the “disjunctures, slippages and paradoxes in the performance of masculinity” (447), since Dinesh assumes a pre-conceived notion of masculinity that resides within the soldier which, as Suresh argues, is made palpable when confronted by the exigencies of war. Even if Suresh’s questions do not provide transformative potential for his young nephew’s view of the army—“I’m not going to give this up,” Dinesh says (Thicker 55)—they undermine received notions of masculinity that are expected to reside in the soldier figure.

Heroism, bravery, and courage—attributes alloyed with the soldier—are problematized in Suresh’s inability to “perform” the role of war hero. In the scene where he receives the Weera Wickrema Vibushana decoration for bravery in the battlefield—the highest valorization bestowed upon the soldier—his sole comment is “I’m not even really sure whether I can be called a war hero” (Thicker 6). Not only is this ceremony testimony to the validation of the hegemonic masculinity ideal, but Suresh’s public disavowal of the honour reinforces the fissures in enacting societal expectations. His public assertion refutes the tacit acceptance of a soldier’s actions for political/social aggrandisement. Moreover, his escalating frustration of being denied active engagement in battle after his injury, concomitant with his sense of emasculation, is revealed in his encounters with family members (most notably, Maithrey, Harsha, and Dinesh). Dinesh regards Suresh as a “coward” (Thicker 56). Despite Suresh’s reluctance to play out the stereotype of the soldier, Kithsiri (Suresh’s uncle) appropriates the honour attached to this construction for advancing his political campaign: “People will listen to you. A war hero’s point of view” (Thicker 11). Kithsiri here invokes how the political arena enables Suresh to reassert his hegemonic masculine role in the context of war, even when Suresh refuses to participate in this collusion.

In their preface to Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh argue that “politics and war have become the seemingly natural homelands of masculinity—a masculinity that sometimes has been quite explicit, but more often has been elided in the equation of ‘man’ with ‘human’ and ‘mankind’” (xii). Hence by this logic, Suresh joining the political campaign should lead to an acquisition of power, but in effect, he is disempowered and becomes a commodity for political purchase. At the end of the play, the configuration of the “war hero” and all its significations are disavowed by Suresh’s final words: “I am not the man you think I am—I am not” (Thicker 57). However, violence follows off-stage; the event is captured by two newspaper headlines projected onto a screen: “War hero slain at political rally” and “Slain hero’s brother wins landslide” (Thicker 58). These headlines erase the possibility of vocalizing an alternative perspective. Though Suresh strives to deconstruct hegemonic masculinity, this act ultimately renders potency to his brother, Harsha, in the political arena. The ambivalence in the characters’ political manoeuvring at the denouement re-enacts the violence of hegemonic masculinity displayed on stage throughout the play, and it ultimately partakes in the reiteration of the “myth of war.”

This violence of hegemonic masculinity is visually pronounced in Only Soldiers, in which the brutalizing effects of “waiting for war in war” occupy a substantial part of the performative space of soldiers on the “same side.” The performativity of hegemonic masculinity through aggression and violence has been widely theorized (e.g. Barrett). Graphic violence is integral to the play. Displays of aggression are most powerfully evoked in the character of Charles, who bangs on the centre table, slams bottles on it, and physically assaults other characters:

CHARLES: (Hurling himself over the table, at Jack) I’ll punch your head for that! I’ll punch your head! Put’em up! D’you hear me? Think you can say what you like to me, do you? I’ll teach you! Do you know how many battles—I’ve been in? I was fighting for my country when you were still fingering your first girlfriend under the Church pews!

He throws a punch and misses, stumbling to the ground. (Only Soldiers 16)

Here is an evocation of the discourse of hegemonic masculinity—the reference to Charles’s prolonged experience in war—which he deploys to validate his use of violence. Godfrey’s ensuing intervention, addressing his fellow soldiers as “Gentlemen,” ironically enacts the disjuncture between anticipated “gentlemanly” behaviour associated with the soldier and that displayed in reality, rendered visible and normalized in the play. Charles consumes alcohol excessively to dispel emotional tension, but alcohol only serves to bolster his aggression, leading to the escalation of physical violence. Such displays of heteronormativity are, as Enloe notes, an instance where “the politics of masculinity are made to seem ‘natural’” (128). Hence, “manliness,” aligned with violence, becomes the ideological discourse underlying the play.

Gender Relations and Sexuality

The earlier evocation in this chapter of the sexual language used by Suresh to intimidate the Old Man in Thicker than Blood already suggested that masculine violence in war operates in the realm of sexual relations. The interconnection between war, sexuality, and masculinity has been explored by numerous critics (e.g. Enloe; Hutchings; Mosse; Whitehead and Barrett; Wood). For example, Mosse significantly states that “aggression” in war “is fuelled by the libidinal drive” (124). He further argues that

the national cause was supposed to absorb man’s sexual drive and his eroticism. … The war, then, was regarded by many volunteers as an instrument of personal and national regeneration, transcending the sexual instinct and exalting the instinct for aggression and battle. (117)

However, concurrently, as Elizabeth Wood asserts, several forms of actual sexual violence occur in war, and “includ[e] rape, sexual torture and mutilation, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, enforced sterilization, and forced pregnancy” (133).

Both Thicker than Blood and Only Soldiers visually inscribe the sexual and aggressive qualities of the hegemonic masculine ideal. In Thicker than Blood the Old Man highlights rape as a war weapon in his comment: “And what do you think you do when you catch one of our girls?” (Thicker 4). Such performances of hegemonic masculinity in its most virulent form are not contested by Suresh or any other character. The absence of an interrogation of the politics of rape by the characters may be read as a testimony to the facile acceptance of rape as “inevitable” in the theatre of war by the playwright. As Wood argues,

common explanations for wartime reflect that emphasis: Rape is an effective strategy of war, particularly of ethnic cleansing; rape is one form of atrocity and occurs alongside other atrocities; war provides the opportunity for widespread rape, and many if not all male soldiers will take advantage of it. (132)

These sentiments tacitly validate hegemonic masculinity and the use of sexual violence as a release for the male libido.

Thicker than Blood also theatricalizes how masculinity inhabits, and is played out in relation to, sexuality within the context of the patriarchal household. The staging of Suresh’s disinclination to accept his medal for bravery is immediately followed by a scene with Maithrey (his brother’s wife). The stage directions explicitly allude to a sexual relationship between them: “Maithrey plays with the top of her blouse until it comes undone. She holds on to the ends with her fingers before letting the ends fall open. Suresh makes more room for his hands by pulling the blouse open around the collar” (Thicker 9). Malalasekera suggests that Suresh’s relationship with his brother’s wife may be regarded as a way of restoring the “manliness” presupposed in the soldier (3). Such a dynamic can be construed as a desperate attempt on his part to retain this identity, constructed on the battlefield, in the domain of the home (an identity that finds expression in the scenes with the Old Man, and even after Suresh’s transition to civilian life as a disabled soldier). An illicit relationship with his brother’s wife may be considered a defining factor in his post-combat behaviour, a means of dismantling his brother’s power as the head of the patriarchal household. As Beth Linker states in War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America, “regardless of whether the injury occurred while involved in combat or behind the front lines, physical disability emasculated men, making them incomplete” (130).

The juxtaposition of the scene involving Suresh and Maithrey against the Military Awards Ceremony, albeit possibly unintentional on the part of the playwright, nonetheless allows for a reading that unearths a tension interpolated within the male soldier. On the one hand, Suresh is unsettled by having to acknowledge the masculinist underpinnings of the “war hero.” This aversion is re-enacted by Suresh in the last scene, where he loses his life while striving to undermine the “war hero” position, appropriated by his uncle and brother for their political manoeuvring. On the other hand, a clandestine sexual relationship may present a way of reclaiming the disempowerment produced by war injury, exposing the contradictions that the soldier inhabits both on and off the battlefield.

Only Soldiers also relies heavily on sexual stereotypes which are embedded in a narrative that overplays sexuality within a hegemonic masculine construction and simultaneously conflates it with a narrow range of female subject positions. The absence of nuanced female characters, the denial of a theatrical space for their voices to be heard, and situating the female characters on the margins of the narrative (where they function as mere referents in the letters and stories of the men), inscribes the inflection of the power dynamics of masculinity and femininity in war. Femininity is overdetermined through archetypal gender relationships, such as mother and son, husband and wife, and soldier and sex worker. The text repeatedly invokes the “mother” vs. “whore” binary (Only Soldiers 7, 8, 9, 14, 17). In the play, sexual activity is evoked in a scene which situates Godfrey behind a bookcase that rocks violently to depict him having sexual intercourse with a “prostitute.” The manoeuvre of the shaking bookcase is juxtaposed with the auditory effect of a voiced-over letter addressed to Godfrey’s aunt, whose role is predicated on a conventional image of woman as nurturer. The voice-over letter frames the older woman as a maternal figure, securing legitimacy in her role in opposition to the young female sex worker, who is cast by the other men as a “whore”:

JACK: Do you not know, Lenny? Our wonder boy, Godfrey here’s found himself a girl. Only problem is, she’s a fuckin whore!

They all laugh.

GODFREY: Don’t call her that, Sir.

The others guffaw. Jokes are exchanged. (Only Soldiers 7)

Godfrey’s girlfriend becomes a denigrated subject of ridicule, interpellated entirely through sexual objectification. His emotional investment in the relationship is demonstrated by his plea to avoid referring to her as a “whore.” The trivializing of this request by the others, and their continued derision, captures virulent sexualizing against the backdrop of war. As previously stated, Mosse has identified a close relationship between war and male sexuality. Godfrey’s (hetero)sexual activity is overlaid with sensationalism by his colleagues, functioning not only as a source of entertainment but also as a replacement for military combat.

Conclusion

The two plays examined in this chapter can be regarded as radical in exploring a “taboo” subject in English theatre in Sri Lanka, and they merit commendation for their innovative theatricalization in the deployment of space (especially in Only Soldiers), visualization, and auditory effects. Only Soldiers certainly makes a case for unorthodox spaces that allow audiences to be more receptive to what the production intends to communicate (Malalasekera 3). Likewise, Thicker than Blood, albeit less inventive in its staging devices, strives to navigate the complexities of war, masculinity, politics, and gender relations within the bourgeoisie who, “given the influence and resources at their command and the structure of political and economic power in Sri Lanka … bears a great responsibility for the conflict” (Saravanamuttu 3). However, the recurrence of the tropes of militarization in the plays demonstrates that “the privileging of masculinity stubbornly persist[s]” (Enloe 217). Even though Thicker than Blood and Only Soldiers forcefully render how war is predicated on received notions of masculinity, which then become a conduit for the deployment of violence, their denouements disavow the disruption of the hegemonic masculine ideal and install the militarized hegemonic masculinity as inviolable. To dismiss these plays for their failure to problematize the power that resides within such discourse is simplistic. Rather, the plays call attention to the challenge of contesting discourses which have become deeply embedded in public consciousness, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

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24. Welandawe-Prematilleke, Arun. Only Soldiers. 2014. Unpublished Script.

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26. Wood, Elizabeth Jean. “Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?” Politics and Society 37.1 (2009): 131–61. Web. 24 Jan. 2020.