Counting and Cracking  - Sydney Festival Memories

Counting and Cracking by S. S. Shakthidharan (2019)

In what was a thrilling takeover of Sydney Town Hall, S Shakthidharan’s decades-spanning Sri Lankan-Australian saga delivered a work of enormous emotional range and physical scale that, thanks to inspired directing and design (and live music), felt engrossingly intimate.

Co-directed by Shakthidharan and Belvoir’s Eamon Flack, this was Sydney-made theatre at an international festival scale. Sixteen performers speaking six languages including Tamil, Sinhala and English unfurled a story connecting the terrors of the Sri Lankan civil war to the suburbs of modern day Sydney.

A bridge toward understanding, a beautifully-made empathy machine, Counting and Cracking deserved all the plaudits heaped upon it and went on to seasons in the UK and United States.