Counting And Cracking, Sydney Town Hall. Photo: Brett Boardman
Get ready to lose yourself into another world. Counting and Cracking is an immersive experience that will compel you to think, touch your heart and make you wonder. We’re only just starting 2019 but this play is going to be one of the year’s highlights. No question.
Spanning 50 years, two countries, three generations and six languages (with visiting actors from all over the world), it’s clever and multi-layered with themes of belonging, about connections broken and new connections, about migration, about politics and its consequences, but most of all about family, and love, and human resilience. It’s epic in scale and intimate in detail, the story is perfectly structured, beautifully told and realised in Sydney Town Hall, because it needs a bigger stage than Belvoir’s (and also there’s a resonance in a venue that is for everyone, from young kids in their first school concerts to grand conference attendees and citizenship ceremonies).
We begin in Western Sydney in 2004 where Rahda (Nadie Kammallaweera from Sri Lanka), together with a Hindu priest (Gandhi Macintyre ), is enlisting the help of her reluctant 21-year-old son Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar) to ceremoniously dispose of the ashes of her mother into the Georges River. Sid, Sydney-born and bred, doesn’t understand the half of it: “I’m not sure we should walk into the river. It looks pretty green. This is probably illegal”. And this is because Rahda does not talk about “her Ceylon”– the memories are just too painful. She has closed her heart to the homeland she fled where “the government murdered [her] husband”.
Counting And Cracking, Sydney Town Hall. Photo: Brett Boardman
We switch to a Colombo jail where the guards are happily listening to a Test match while one of the jailors explains why he enjoys beating the Tamil prisoner. It’s a retaliation against the Tamil Tigers, one of whom, a suicide bomber, was responsible for the death of his parents. The jailer “feels a little bit better every time [his prisoner, who is not a Tiger] feels worse”.
Scene 3 we’re in Coogee with Sid and his new girlfriend Lily (Rarriwuy Hick), a Yolngu woman from Arnhem Land who is studying Law at the same uni Sid is doing Media Studies. Lily presses Sid for information about his homeland, what home means. It’s Sydney; his mum won’t tell him about Sri Lanka. He doesn’t know who his dad is, or was. “Can you have two homes?” asks Sid. Lily doesn’t think so.
Then we meet Ismet, Sid’s Turkish neighbour Ismet (Hazzam Shammas), who as well as installing aircons provides a lot of humour, not least in his incomprehension of Skippy (Skype) and computers. Live musicians using Sri Lankan instruments to play the Skype ring tone is a nice touch, one of many in this play.
We also learn that Rahda is one smart cookie, forthright and often unintentionally funny, and quite capable of looking after herself and her (in her eyes) errant son. Ismet makes the mistake of asking to talk to her husband. “Do you see a husband?” she snaps back. She also sends a fundraiser for the Tamil Tigers packing. Her family is Tamil, they are not militants.
Counting And Cracking, Sydney Town Hall. Photo: Brett Boardman
Act 2 takes us back to Colombo in 1957 and Rahda is one day old. Later we will see she has has had a privileged upbringing. While her parents have been “running around Australia and Canada, selling cinnamon”, she has been brought up by her grandparents, her Apah (Prakash Belawadi, from India) and Aacha (Sukania Vungopal, from Malaysia). He’s a mathematical genius and government minister; she’s the ruler of the home roost. They have friends of all persuasions – notably Vinsanda (Monroe Reimers), who is also in the government – but things are changing fast in Ceylon and they are not on the same side. “No politics in my house!” shouts Aacha – time and again. “Weddings are more important than politics,” she says. Family is all.
But there are always politics. The Sinhalese majority is flexing its muscles and forcing the Tamil minority to forsake their language in favour of Sinhala. Politically expedient, and very divisive. “Two languages, one country,” says Apah. “One language, two countries.”
The rifts in Sri Lanka will escalate and force Radha (young Rahda is played by Vaishnavi Suryaprakash) to leave the country. She is four months’ pregnant and her husband Thirru (Anthonythesan Jesuthasan, from France) is missing, presumed dead – a target because he is a Tamil and his sister has joined the militants.
We have met Thirru already. The astute will put two and two together in Scene 2. His release from jail after 21 years, and his attempts to join his wife and meet his son, will make him a refugee, a boatperson, a Villawood detainee. It will also show Radha, Sid and the audience what Radha has lost by leaving her beloved homeland, what Thirru has lost, and the different ways in which humans survive, sometimes thrive, and sometimes die.
Counting And Cracking, Sydney Town Hall. Photo: Brett Boardman
And it does all this without hectoring, which is pretty amazing in itself. The story is all. Playwright Shakthidharan says all the characters are fictional, though truths are woven through his words. Of course they are, because we don’t have to look far, either in this country or in international headlines, to see divisive tactics used for political gain. What happened in Sri Lanka is not something unique. Persecution of minorities is not unique.
Belvoir’s Eamon Flack directs, and the production is seamless. Every member of the 16-strong cast shines, so it’s hard to single some out. However, special mention to the two Rahdas, Apah and Aacha. Dale Ferguson is in charge of set design and it is no stretch to imagine yourself at a Sri Lankan wedding, in the courtyard of a house where mobs are rioting outside, at a home in Sydney where a wife learns by phone that her husband is in fact alive.
There is so much to see and understand and say about Counting and Cracking. At the time of writing, some tickets were still available. I might just go get another one for myself!
Counting and Cracking, by S Shakthidharan, Belvoir and Co-Curious plays at Sydney Town Hall until February 2.
