Certain theatrical events are seared into the national consciousness, accessible even to those who weren’t privy to their actual performances. The monumental stage adaptations of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, both directed by Neil Armfield, come to mind. Now we can confidently add Counting and Cracking to the list, another piece of epic theatre on a vast emotional canvas.
Written by S Shakthidharan (Shakthi, as he’s affectionately known) and directed by Eamon Flack, Counting and Cracking tells a gripping intergenerational story of cultural rift, of war and diaspora, family and politics. It splits its focus between several time periods and across continents – from the first stirrings of civil unrest in Sri Lanka circa 1956 to the hardening of the Migration Act in Australia in 2004. Its cast of 19 performers hail from six different countries and play a total of 50 characters.
Playing as part of Melbourne’s Rising festival before it heads back to Sydney for a second run, the show has toured most of Australia and the UK, and will feature at New York’s Public theatre in September. For those who came into early contact with Shakthi’s script, the production’s success feels like a vindication.
“I still remember exactly where I was when I first read it, on the banks of the Yarra River,” Flack says. “I remember getting halfway through the wedding scene in act two and thinking, we must find a way to do this.” Something about its scope and ambition, its cultural significance and political potency, hit Flack immediately.
“Shakthi and I made a deal: that if we did it, we’d do it properly, that it wouldn’t just be a piece of cultural charity.” The script needed finessing, so “we got to work plotting and re-plotting it. As we worked on it, rather than becoming smaller and more doable, the play got bigger and bigger”.
It’s true there is a teeming, shambolic quality to Counting and Cracking – it runs for three-and-a-half hours and traverses four generations of a Sri Lankan family. But in many ways this is key not only to its immense appeal but to the play’s central thesis: war is a terrible fissure, and the strands of community come leaking out through its gaps. Reconciliation is messy and protracted, and the gathering up of all that’s been scattered is agonising and slow. It takes generations to heal.
For Miles Franklin award-winning novelist Shankari Chandran – whose own work explores with great sensitivity the displacement and trauma of the Sri Lankan experience – this generational healing is Counting and Cracking’s crucial achievement. “I went with my entire extended family,” she says. “It was very exciting for our community, because there’d never been a play in a mainstream theatre that’s explored the issues of that war, of our history and migration to Australia.”
Chandran identified closely with Counting and Cracking’s main character, Siddhartha (played with casual charm by Shiv Palekar) – an Australian-born Sri Lankan with scant knowledge of his mother’s fractured history. Sri Lankan culture is “incredibly expressive and affectionate,” Chandran says, “but we hold trauma and negative experiences very tightly within ourselves. There’s a commitment to stoicism that is not always healthy.” Like many people fleeing war, their reluctance to share the painful past can lead to a stifling silence in the home.
There is a telling moment in the play when Aacha (Sukania Venugopal), Siddhartha’s great-grandmother and family matriarch, says: “I don’t want politics in this house.” It’s a justifiable aim, but during a civil war in particular – where families are riven and friends and neighbours turn on each other – politics breaches every home.
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Audience reactions to Counting and Cracking, especially from people who experienced the trauma first-hand, have been overwhelmingly positive – perhaps because the script treats both sides of the conflict, Sinhalese and Tamil, with compassion and nuance. “They’re totally open,” Flack says, “emotionally, intellectually, even physically. Everyone is sort of swept into the feat of it, the meaning of it, the beauty of human achievement.”
It’s been vital for the Sri Lankan-Australian community in ways that extend beyond theatre and politics. Chandran’s father, who “is quite a restrained person, not prone to showing emotion”, sought out the playwright in the theatre foyer to thank him personally. “There’s something extraordinary about being seen,” Chandran says, “particularly for those who are not used to being seen”.
But it’s also the joy and spirit of the enterprise that makes Counting and Cracking so memorable and moving, not just for members of the Sri Lankan diaspora but for all of us. It’s a grand example of rough theatre – “a playful poor theatre”, Flack says – where the actors create the world of the play using their bodies and the paltry props at hand. It seems to vibrate with the spirit of Sri Lanka itself. It also expands our concept of Australian theatre, pushing out the boundaries of our national identity.
As the issue of migration heats up in Australia and intractable war plays out overseas, Counting and Cracking’s themes of reconciliation and communion seem more vital than ever. “I think, horribly, the world has become more like the political world of the play,” Flack says. “People are being driven through fear into their own communities.” But Counting and Cracking creates a “space where contradictory and even irreconcilable viewpoints can coexist”; it’s hard to think of theatre more immediately relevant than that.