S Shakthidharan gives an insight into the creation of Counting & Cracking

When playwright S Shakthidharan, known as Shakthi, was growing up in Australia his parents never discussed their homeland of Sri Lanka or their reasons for leaving. It took the writing of a play, Counting and Cracking which comes to Birmingham Rep this August, for Shakthi to discover not just the hidden past of his family but to also better understand the country they had called home.

And the play, which spans fifty years and four generations, struck a chord with people from all backgrounds when it premiered in Sydney in 2019. After winning a host of awards, Counting and Cracking comes to the UK this summer playing just two venues – Edinburgh International Festival and The Rep.

“My parents had not talked much about Sri Lanka and I was in my late twenties when I just kind of realised that there was a version of myself which was more about fitting into Australia than understanding who I was,” says Shakthi. “And I couldn’t really understand myself without knowing more about my family’s past.”

Initially his parents were unwilling to unlock their family secrets so Shakthi decided to create a community arts project in which he asked other people among the Sri Lankan diaspora to share their stories.

“I talked to so many people and there was this version of Sri Lanka’s story post-colonisation that seems like a shared narrative amongst those people that really isn’t talked about much in the media and in history.

“That was about how interwoven and united Sri Lanka is – it is so common for people from different cultures to get married or to work together and certainly to live together. Colombo is a city in which there is a church next to a mosque next to a temple.

“And the story that I started to learn was one in which it became convenient to use the politics of division to win elections and then that kind of created divisions in the country that weren’t there before. It started in a way that was about gaining power but the consequences of that 40 to 50 years later was a country slipping into violence which it couldn’t control.”

Shakthi also visited relatives still living in Sri Lanka and discovered their personal history reflected the nation’s experiences.

“I was sitting in one of my uncle’s houses and he had a shoebox full of letters from one of my great-grandfathers to his grandchildren. And we started reading them to each other and came across this incredible larger-than-life man who was born a farmer and became the only Tamil politician in the first post-independence cabinet in Sri Lanka.

“And the arc of his life from being an optimistic unifier to someone who had given up on the government protecting its minorities seemed to mirror the arc of my homeland.

“I realised in that moment you could tell a family’s story and a country’s story in one. And so the play began to emerge from that but also it all became very real for me. The theoretical process became a very personal one in terms of reckoning with my own family history.”

Shakthi’s mother attended a reading of some scenes her son had written and she also began to open up about their family’s experiences.

By Diane Parkes