Ernest Macintyre Ernest Macintyre i(A10259 works by) (a.k.a. Ernest Thalayasingam Macintyre)
Born: Established: 1934
c
Sri Lanka,
c
South Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
;
Gender: Male
Arrived in Australia: 1973
Heritage: Sri Lankan
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BiographyHistory

During the 1960s Ernest Macintyre was one of Sri Lanka's most prolific and successful playwrights in English. While he was in the Sri Lankan Air Force (1961-1967), and while Director of the drama school of Aquinas University College (1968-1969) and a UNESCO project officer (1969-1973) he established a performing group, Stage and Set, which produced international plays as well as his own. His early plays included 'The Full Circle of Caucasian Chalk' (1967), 'The President of the Old Boys' Club' (1970) and 'The Education of Miss Asia' (1971; later performed at the Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, 1979). 'Treated to the sophisticated craftsmanship of his productions and provoked by the thematic relevance of his plays, the expanding English-speaking audience [of Sri Lanka] developed a taste for political and social drama' (Frontline: India's National Magazine vol.6, no. 4 1999 (http://www.flonnet.com/fl1604/16040690.htm).

Macintyre emigrated to Australia in the 1970s and has since made a name for himself in the Australian theatre, particularly with his plays Let's Give them Curry (1981), and his Rasanayagam's Last Riot (1993) and 'He Still Comes from Jaffna' in which he explores the effects of the conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka. He has also taken works by Leonard Woolf, Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekov and adapted them for the stage with a Sri Lankan flavour.

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • Another play by MacIntryre, as yet unperformed and unpublished (February 2006) is 'The Fountains of Paradise', a play in three scenes, written in Australia. Of this play, MacIntyre writes that it 'was first written in the mid eighties after the shock of meeting a little boy after many years, grown to be a man, refelecting the change from the meek and the obedient to the vibrant and fearless challenger of accepted 'truth'. The play was then put away, unfinished. In 1990 this young man, Richard de Zoysa - poet, playwright, actor, journalist - was murdered by agents of the Government of Sri Lanka, in the context of the youth uprising of the years 1989-90. I then took up the play again and completed it, in 1990. It is allegorical.' (Personal correspondence.)
  • Author writes in these languages: ENGLISH
Last amended 16 Aug 2006 14:18:37
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