“Growing up, I didn’t know much about my homeland or my family history,” says award-winning Tamil playwright S. Shakthidharan.
His family was forced to leave Sri Lanka as a result of the 1983 Black July pogrom in Colombo, where an estimated 5,600 Tamils were killed. They eventually settled in Sydney’s western suburbs.
His mother, Anandavalli, is an internationally renowned Bharathanatyam and Kuchipudi dancer, choreographer and teacher. Needing an income source as a single parent in Australia, she eventually started Lingalayam Dance Academy in 1987, expanding it to a dance company in 1996.
While she preserved this classical art form, giving Shakthi an avenue to connect with his heritage, her life through the war remained a mystery to him.
“Amma barely mentioned Sri Lanka,” he says.
“Since then, I’ve learnt it was because leaving the country was so painful for her, she didn’t want to talk about it again.”
He eventually visited his uncle in Sri Lanka to find out about his family history, against his mother’s wishes. While there, his uncle shared a shoebox of his great-grandfather’s letters, which helped uncover hidden parts of his family’s legacy.
This all spurred him to dig deeper into Sri Lanka’s history and his own, talking to members of his community from all over the world — from politicians to those seeking asylum.
These conversations planted the initial seeds for what would become his ground-breaking, three-hour theatre production, Counting and Cracking.
Unfolding across three acts, five decades and four generations, Counting and Cracking explores the linkages between Sri Lanka’s political history and Sydney’s thriving diaspora through an intergenerational family story.
Given the complexity of Sri Lanka’s politics, creating a work that offered a nuanced perspective was important to Shakthi.
“Counting and Cracking is a piece of fiction overall, but it’s made up of bits of real life, different truths those in our community have shared with me,” he says.
“But the story of the mother and son, and of the grandfather, are very close to stories in my own family.”
Developing the play has helped fill in a lot of gaps for him.
“It’s come full circle on my journey of migration – I now fully understand why my family left Sri Lanka,” says Shakthi. And his mother feels the same.
“This show has healed her relationship with her homeland. She won’t stop talking about Sri Lanka now!” he says.
“I think most migrants are only their full selves in private. They connect fully with their culture, their traditions, behind closed doors. To tell the gloriously complex story of your community in full public view, and to have other people embrace that, has been a radical act of belonging.”
Bringing Sri Lanka’s story to life
In collaboration with Belvoir St Theatre’s Artistic Director Eamon Flack, Shakthi brought together a cast of 19 performers from six countries for Counting and Cracking.
He incorporated Carnatic music, as well as Bharathanatyam choreographed by his mother, Anandavalli.
Aligned with its mission to reconcile Sri Lanka’s complex past and stories from the contemporary diaspora, Tamil, Singhalese and English are interspersed throughout the show’s dialogue.
All of these facets emphasise the epic scale of telling this saga.
“The ensemble make this show. It took four years to find them, from all over the world; artists who believed in the show and could speak the various languages, play the different ages,” he says.
The play was originally mounted as part of the 2019 Sydney Festival, and has since received significant critical acclaim, including winning the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature and Helpmann Awards for Best Production and Best Direction.
After a long five-year wait and an international tour to the UK, including at the Edinburgh International Festival and the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, the show has finally made its way to Melbourne — home of the largest Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia — as part of the upcoming RISING festival in May and June.
“We may not be able to stage it in Australia again. It’s so big and so unusual; it’s taken us so long to figure out a way to get it to Melbourne.
“It’s such a hard thing to make happen and a miracle every time it does,” says Shakthi.
Critical to Counting and Cracking’s success was pushing against expectations of what kind of theatre would appeal to local audiences and represent the Australian identity on an international stage.
Shakthi was very determined to shift the traditional methodology that usually preferences familiar western stories, known talent and concise narrative styles.
“We have a long history of copying London and New York and doing the English cannon well,” he says.
“But there is a unique prospect in telling our migration stories in our own way; this can be the way we talk about Australia to the world. It’s been hard to bring that way of thinking to main stage theatre, but Belvoir embraced it,” reflects Shakthi.
As the show is restaged for different venues and contexts, Shakthi and the creative team continue to sharpen it, depending on audiences.
The Melbourne iteration will be staged at University of Melbourne’s newly built Union Theatre, presenting the show in an intimate space and giving consideration to the large international student populace at the institution.
“In Birmingham, we had very diverse audiences, in culture and class. The energy at the end of those shows was palpable. You could feel it — you had goosebumps. I hope that happens in Melbourne,” says Shakthi.
The future of South Asian storytelling
Counting and Cracking has provided a blueprint for telling community-centric stories authentically in mainstream theatre.
“The more specific about how Sri Lankan and Tamil it was, the more universal it felt,” says Shakthi. “We all have family secrets. We all fall in love. The idea that the lives of our elders and the wisdom they give us can guide our future is so important right now.”
Forming production company CuriousWorks in his 20s, and primarily having worked in small to medium arts spaces, Shakthi had always been sceptical about working with larger mainstream institutions.
But when his wife and mother convinced him to attend the Helpmann Awards (for live entertainment and performing arts in Australia), the response from other people at his accolades cemented how important it was for the next generation of storytellers to be inspired by this success.
Shakthi has since left CuriousWorks and founded Kurinji, with Aimée Falzon, with the aim of focusing on his independent practice and telling uniquely South Asian stories in their “infinite complexity”.
In a moment of vulnerability, he expressed previous career inhibitions that made him question whether he had a creative voice worth sharing. As a migrant and an only child, he had felt the expectations of being a provider, and pursuing an arts career seemed counter intuitive.
“Counting and Cracking was a way for me to share the theatre I wanted to share and develop the kind of processes I wanted to be involved in,” he says.
“It enabled me to be more vulnerable with who and what I am as an independent artist.”
Counting and Cracking is showing from May 31 – June 23 as part of the RISING Festival in Melbourne.