Sri Lanka
According to Prof. E. R. Sarachchandra, the earliest Sri-Lankan passion plays were enacted at Pesalai in Mannar and at Duwa and PitiPana in Negombo. These passion plays were performed by means of life-size statues inside a large pavilion with a roof about twenty feet high (The Folk Drama of Ceylon, p. 124). It was K. Lawrence Perera, the pioneer of the Borelassa Passion play who brought innovative changes in 1924 by using living actors instead of statues as “ he thought that the Passion shows done in Church premises with statues were “crude” and unworthy of so lofty a theme as the passion of Christ.” (The Folk Drama of Ceylon, p. 126). It was the Oberammergau Passion play which influenced Lawrence Perera for this innovation. But the Archbishop of Colombo disapproved his another innovation of using women in the cast and the play was banned in 1939. (See for an extensive research on this, Wijith Rohan, The History, the Content and the Form of Sri- Lankan Passion Play, pp. 265–290).
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