Chris Greet first belonged to a Colombo that is only a historical memory of Lankans of his vintage, of a few days ago. A few people that would be, and naturally fewer as days go by. A Colombo, associated with the old Radio Ceylon off Bullers Road, the early Lionel Wendt Theatre, the Regal Film Theatre, The Majestic in Bambalapitiya. Cargills, Millers, Apothecaries and Caves in the Fort shopping area and clanging tram cars in Pettah running past the Rupee Stores. Chris made his early life moving between these, remnant colonial places, as daily liver, outstanding radio announcer and voice artist and merry actor in shows at theatres in the city.
I came to know him well after Bullers Road became Baudhaloka Mawatha. Neither Chris nor I knew who Buller was, so we were not unchangeable colonials. After getting to know him from Arthur Van Langenberg’s musicals at the Lionel Wendt I next came to work closely with him after the JVP uprising of 1971. It was this uprising that led me into the major play of my Sri Lankan period. I wrote The Education Of Miss Asia in late 1971 as a reaction to the uprising. The education on Asia of this Lankan beauty queen, for Miss World in London, was by a vagrant street actor, posing off as a professor from Calcutta, hired mistakenly by the girl’s parents to coach her. Chris Greet was my choice for the vagrant actor pretending to be a professor.
My choice of Chris was what made the play, and led to it becoming a GCE Advanced Level text for many years. Chris, who himself rose from a difficult childhood, to be a valuable contributor to the life of his society, grasped the role in the play, instinctively.
The ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the great famine of Bihar, the bloody red rivers of Indonesia, Chris conveyed to the feelings of the audience, in a such a moving way, revealing that his visible life as a happy-go-lucky Colombo guy helped submerge a deep-feeling human, at base. It was Chris’s performance, Professor Ashley Halpe told me, that moved him to recommend the play for the Lankan schools syllabus.
An actor not trained formally in the art of acting, Chris resorted to a feeling for life, to move an audience by conveying to them what he felt. What the ancient Indians called the actor’s art of Abhinaya, he could perform naturally through his love of life in its finest sense.
The last words he spoke in “The Education Of Miss Asia”, derived from Rabindranath Tagore, about the succour from life as well as from death, as adjoining breasts, would sum up the good life of Chris Greet.
CHRIS, CENTRE, IN “THE EDUCATION OF MISS ASIA”
