S. SHAKTHIDHARAN is a western Sydney storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry. Shakthi is a writer, director and producer of theatre and film, and composer of original music. His debut play Counting and Cracking (Belvoir and Co-Curious) received community, commercial and critical acclaim at the 2019 Sydney and Adelaide Festivals. The script won the Victorian Premier’s Literature Prize and the NSW Premier’s Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting; the production won seven Helpmann and three Sydney Theatre awards. Shakthi is the Artistic Director of Kurinji and Artistic Lead at Co-Curious. Co-Curious is a sister company to award-winning community arts company CuriousWorks, where Shakthi was the Founder and Artistic Director from 2003 to 2018. Shakthi was the inaugural Carriageworks Associate Artist, a Belvoir Associate Artist and is a recipient of both the Philip Parsons and Kirk Robson awards.
Playwright’s note
Ten years ago I was hungry. Hungry to learn about my mother’s homeland. To know my history. So I started on a journey that had no clear end.
I read everything there was to read on the subject. I had conversations with so many gracious and intelligent Sri Lankans from all around the world. I was reeling from the overload, but slowly, very slowly, a story was being born. It was a story about parents and children. About coming together and breaking apart and coming together again—in our families, our governments, our countries.
And this story became something bigger than my own hunger. It became something that had a power. The power to help my mother reconcile with her homeland. To connect people across deep divides. The power to collapse time and join continents.
The story became less about fitting my community into a simple narrative, and more about presenting a group of people in all their glorious complexity. It became less about discovering ‘the truth’ of what happened in Sri Lanka, or what brought us to Australia, and more about understanding the stage as a sacred space where many truths can gather at once.
The stories we choose to believe in underlie all our actions, thoughts and feelings. In Counting and Cracking I hope to provide readers with a new story to believe in: about Australia; about Sri Lanka.
It’s a story in which migrants are not asked to discard parts of themselves to fit in, but instead are asked to present their full selves, to expand our idea of what this country can be.
It’s a story of how the politics of division can win the battle, but never the war, around how power is gained in this world.
It’s a story in which love may not triumph over adversity, but through sheer persistence and resilience can eventually overcome it.
And finally it’s a story about reconciliation: between parents and children, between neighbours and enemies, between your new home and your old home, between society and its institutions.
Counting and Cracking is dedicated to Lingamani Rajarayan (1933-2018), affectionately known to me as Chinni. Chinni was the first person in my family to open up to me about Sri Lanka. We sat in her kitchen in London and over several days of Scrabble and curry she talked and I listened. Her spirit is woven into the fabric of this story. My only disappointment in the making of this work is that Chinni is not here to see it.
Counting and Cracking features direct quotes from a diverse array of people: Sri Lankan politician (and mathematician) C. Suntharalingam (with the permission of his family), Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge (with the permission of his brother Lal), Yolngu woman and artist (and dear friend) Rosealee Pearson (with the permission of her family), and my mother Anandavalli. Counting and Cracking is a work of fiction and there is no intention for any of its characters to represent or reference anyone in real life. Nevertheless, real life has occasionally worked its way into the story, as it almost always does.
Anjalendran is an architect and my great aunt’s son. We sat at his dining table in the first house he built—his own home, in Colombo. Over lamprais and Chindian takeaway we read aloud my great-grandfather’s public articles and private letters. These were bold and confronting missives. Anjalendran’s resulting frank and honest thoughts on our troubled history did not diminish his pride or sense of belonging to Sri Lanka. I continue to be inspired by his fearless approach to a truthful reconciliation with our past.
Anushya took my wife and I to Jaffna before my mother was ready to go back there. To go to Jaffna for the first time is like an exhalation. There is an impossible amount of expectation before your arrival, and then a slow release as you cross over to the peninsula. You witness a region that is re-building and re-imagining itself, and amidst all that you glimpse the remains of the life that your family once had, long ago. The temple they once helped build and now only donate to. Their old home with its new occupiers. It was on this trip that I first started to understand our ancestral homeland and the fullness of the Sri Lankan picture. Anushya guided us through this complexity with endless patience and a quiet, deep intelligence.
My mother did not talk to me about Sri Lanka in any deep way for the first 30-odd years of my life. She had closed her heart to the country. She has witnessed the development of this work—been a quiet presence for many of the research conversations, attended each of the readings and the showings. The process of making this work has changed her. She is reconciling with her homeland, and has started talking about Ceylon again. In doing so, she has made the choice to be vulnerable. I am grateful for that. It is the hard choice, but we are immeasurably better for it, as artistic collaborators on this project, and as mother and son.
My wife Aimée is the only other person who has known about this play since the beginning. She has seen it as a series of placards pasted up on the wall of a little hut in Tasmania. She has seen all the alternate versions that no-one else will ever see. She knew what this work could be before I did. It is through her I found the confidence to write a story like this.
There are many other people who can’t be mentioned publicly—people who would be labelled things like bureaucrats or prisoners, but who spoke to me with a sense of shared humanity across all of society, no matter their individual position. These people shared at length their most private thoughts and I can only hope that I have adequately honoured their generosity with this story.
A number of unusual and unlikely opportunities were strung together to make writing a work like this a possibility. The years of research and the first scenes were supported through an Australia Council for the Arts Young Artists Initiative grant in 2008—an opportunity that is no longer available. The first drafts were written during my time as Associate Artist at Carriageworks, where absolutely no restrictions were put on what I might do with my time there, from 2013 to 2015.
But the infrastructure of an independent artist alone cannot support a work of this size. From 2011 to 2019 Counting and Cracking was shepherded by CuriousWorks and Co-Curious, forming a part of their artistic program. It is a long time to have a work in development—but without that kind of longevity works like this simply cannot happen.
Since 2013 Eamon Flack and the Belvoir team have done everything in their power to make this story reach our mainstage, including amassing an incredible group of philanthropic supporters. They did not try to change this work to fit into pre-existing structures. Instead they took a leap of faith to make something new, in a new way.
It’s been quite the ride for all of us. Each member in this new coalition has utilised their different sets of expertise to make this wildly ambitious dream a reality. None of us could have done it on our own. Much like the story of Counting and Cracking, the process of making this work proves that real power can be gained when different groups come together to create something new.
S. Shakthidharan
Sydney 2020
To read some responses to
the first production of Counting and Cracking from members of the Sri Lankan community, visit the Kurinji website:
https://kurinji.com.au/counting-and-cracking-community-response/
Director’s note
This is an Australian story. It’s not only an Australian story, but it is definitely an Australian story. Much of it takes place in Sri Lanka: the story of Australia is the story of many places, many people. Ours is a migrant nation on Aboriginal land. At its best it is a land of refuge and new beginnings. With each successive wave of arrivals, from the earliest times to the English boats to now, the country has changed, and the national story has changed. Counting and Cracking is a new offer to that big unfolding story.
It is about many things, but at its heart is the fundamental need every one of us has to connect to each other, the world, the past, and the future. Most of our lives are spent making and nurturing these connections. We do this on every scale of life, in small ways and big ways. The small ways are usually age-old, closely held things—love, family, language, story, belief, food, home, the passage of time from one generation to the next. The big ways are more likely to be newer, more modern, more public inventions—the big shared narratives of national identity, political negotiation, economic purpose. Counting and Cracking is about the relationship between the big stuff and the small stuff, and what happens when the big stuff tears apart the small stuff. A language shattered, a family torn apart, a place torn down—these things are fragile. They cannot be taken for granted. We inherit them, they are in our keeping. The big stuff must take care of the small stuff. The small stuff is what matters most. We cannot be a nation or a whole person if we cannot keep hold of these connections. And when a person or a group of people have been torn apart then the only thing to do is to begin again—to revive the old connections, or make new ones. Fortunately, new connections are always possible. New stories are always possible. We mix from here and there, from now and the past. Water and water.
This show was the product of new connections. Bringing it together took an almighty effort by a great coalition of people from many walks of life. Belvoir could not have done this without Co-Curious, and Co-Curious could not have done this without Belvoir. We each had to discover what we did and didn’t know, and what the other knew that we didn’t. Step by step, through days then weeks then years of conversation, we began to see that this show was not just necessary, it was also possible. Then we had to convince a lot of other people that it was necessary and possible. We had to find new partners, new collaborators. Most people were willing—not all, but most. We travelled around Australia. We travelled to London, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur. We spoke to people in Paris, Wellington, Toronto, New York. We travelled all around Sri Lanka, from Colombo to Jaffna to Kayts to Batticaloa. Little by little the coalition of people and organisations grew. Together it took our two companies almost six years to bring everything into alignment, and it has only been possible because hundreds of people from all over Australia and around the world have joined in.
Eamon Flack
Sydney 2020
Introduction
Radhika Coomaraswamy
Silence. It is usually the first response to violence, humiliation and trauma. Radha, the chief protagonist of S. Shakthidharan’s play Cracking and Counting, has been silent for 20 years. She will not tell her son Siddhartha what took place and why she left Sri Lanka in 1983, and the nature of the unspoken passion that keeps her wedded to a country and a people who appear to have betrayed her. Having found freedom and a new life, she brings up a caring and loving son, who will be an Australian first but will also long for a deeper understanding of his roots and the DNA of his existence.
Siddhartha understands that his mother has made the choice to be vulnerable. Having left Sri Lanka apparently widowed, pregnant and alone, she has never remarried and has kept her family and her values together. She did not take short cuts or adopt false gods. She created a home for the creativity of her child; a home open to the world while deeply anchored in Asian traditions. She did not take an easy path to security, just relied on hard work and a good heart. Her son is her legacy.
From the late 1970s, Tamil discourse emanating from Sri Lanka increasingly became fraught with anger, hate and intolerance. The riots of 1983 became the intense focal point of Tamil identity. The sense of grievance and victimhood carried the world over by fleeing asylum seekers and migrants saw the rise of militarism within Sri Lanka and the unspoken communal duty of no compromise with the Sinhalese.
Voices of compassion and humanism that could have given direction to the violence and suffering of the Sri Lankan Tamil community were forsaken, erased or assassinated. The beauty of this play is that it finally evokes that voice—the muted voice of humanism—and brings it centrestage. At its core, the play reminds us of the interconnectedness of the world and the universal struggles for justice and rights.
The 1983 riots are central to Sri Lankan Tamil identity. The political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson writes of how many groups are held together by memories of collective victimhood and trauma. For Sri Lankan Tamils, 1983 and the end of the war in 2009 often define the way they interact with the world. The year 1983 has been erased within Sri Lanka, forgotten by the vast majority of Sinhalese. The refusal to commemorate or retell the events of that year has effectively wiped out the memory from their point of view. But for Sri Lankan Tamils, especially those who fled overseas, it remains central. For many of those over 35 years of age, it has come to define the contours of who they are.
This definition of who one is when it comes to traumatic events can come in terms of increasing militancy, strident agitation and a withdrawal into an exclusive identity. Alternatively, it can be an act of reconciliation, looking deeply into our wounds with the hope of healing. Counting and Cracking is perhaps the most heroic example of the latter approach. The main theme of the play is reconciliation through truth telling. It is epic in scale, pulling together a diverse cast of characters and disparate scenes to weave a story of atonement and recovery. At the end of the play you feel you have lived through the emotions of a whole historic era.
Funerals have become an awkward moment in the lives of Sri Lankan Tamils living in Sri Lanka or abroad. It is therefore fitting that the play opens with Radha and her son Siddhartha on the banks of the Georges River, attempting to scatter the ashes of Radha’s recently deceased mother. Ironically, Radha remembers that she fled Sri Lanka in 1983 with the ashes of her precious grandfather, fresh from cremation and placed inside a Tupperware box. She has yet to dispose of them. During the heyday of Sri Lankan Tamil existence, before 1983, funerals and weddings would mean hundreds of people gathering together. Managing such crowds was part of the rituals a young girl had to learn.
The scene is very different now. There are only three people at the Georges River funeral—the priest, Radha and Siddhartha. The priest asks that a male from the family accompany Siddhartha into the water to throw the ashes. ‘There is no-one,’ Radha says. The priest insists. Radha is equally adamant, so the priest relents and the ceremony takes place. While Sri Lankan Tamil funerals abroad in the larger cities sometimes draw the diaspora community together, Sri Lankan Tamil funerals in Colombo now have barely enough people to carry the coffin or be pallbearers. The opportunity to mourn, grieve and recover, either as individuals, families or a collective has so radically transformed.
As Siddhartha throws the ashes into the river, he sees the grander vision of water mixing with water. When he confesses his love to his Aboriginal girlfriend Lily, and they reflect on the lack of interconnectedness between their realities, he remembers the water. They reflect on how the water carrying the ashes of Siddhartha’s grandmother would inevitably make its way and mix with the waters of Yirrkala, Lily’s homeland. The mixing and the incessant flow is the universe’s answer to our constant bickering and parochialism.
The play, though deeply inquisitive about Sri Lankan reality, is fina
lly about the fluidity and hybridity of identity itself. It is a grand vision that highlights our roots as well as our contradictions. Despite all the tensions, Radha’s grandmother wanted her to marry the Sinhalese son of her father’s best friend. Radha infuriated her grandparents by marrying the son of a fruit seller, now an engineer, who was of a different Tamil caste. That radical choice and the negative reaction of Radha’s family to it—‘marriage is the coming together of two families’—reminds us that diversity practically always comes with resistance.
The intensity of communal conflict is set against the omnipresence of multiculturalism. Siddhartha’s name is Buddhist though his parents are Hindu. Radha sings ‘thevarams’ to Siddhartha on their balcony in Sydney and he muses when he is older that his identity was not only ‘mustard seeds and curry leaves’ but also ‘salty air and beer’. Siddhartha’s clothes are always a mixture of east and west. The play is full of the rich and dynamic interaction of cultures. It is water constantly flowing. Lily, Siddhartha’s girlfriend, says she had a DNA test done and that part of her is Sri Lankan. Muslim neighbours sharing Ramadan feasts, and Turkish air conditioner installers seeking romantic dates fill the pages of this play with multi-ethnicity like breathing fresh air after you have been caught in a tunnel.
A towering figure in the play, obviously based on the life of the playwright’s own family member, is Apah, Radha’s grandfather, who brings her up while her parents are abroad. This larger than life, lion-hearted character was a professor of mathematics, a graduate of Cambridge University and a cabinet member of the present Parliament. ‘From the paddy field to the algebraic equation’, he symbolises the Sri Lankan intellectuals and politicians who brought us independence. Contentious, vociferous and performative, they move away from consensus building to open conflict and direct challenge. While his friend and cabinet colleague Vinsanda drifts toward dictatorship in trying to deal with the JVP insurrection, Apah strongly resists all attempts to compromise democracy. It is inevitable that he would die of a broken heart in 1983.
Counting and Cracking Page 1
