Counting and Cracking

The play concerns four generations of the one Tamil family across Sri Lanka and Australia, from 1956 to 2004.). Shakthi said "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". The first lines of the play are spoken in Tamil and Sinhala, and translated into English by actors not participating in the action in that scene. there are additional short lines in Tamil and Sinhalese, translated as it moves on. ==Original cast and crew==

The cast in Sydney and Adelaide included Vaishnavi Suryaprakash and Kalieaswari Srinivasan (both as Radha); Jay Emmanuel and Antonythasan Jesuthasan (as Thirru); Shiv Palekar (as Sid/Siddhartha); Rarriwuy Hick (Lily). Stefan Gregory was composer and sound designer. Dale Ferguson designed the sets and Damien Cooper was responsible for the lighting. ==Productions==

The play was first produced by Belvoir and Co-Curious at the Sydney Town Hall in January 2019 for the Sydney Festival in Sydney, with artistic director of the Belvoir, Eamon Flack as director. It has a cast of 19 and runs for three and a half hours. Both seasons sold out. In August 2022, as part of the "UK/Australia Season", a collaboration between the British Council and the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Counting and Cracking toured to the UK, first at the Royal Lyceum as part of the Edinburgh Festival The cast featured 19 performers. The Times gave it a five-star review, From 31 May to 23 June 2024, the show was presented as part of the RISING: festival in Melbourne, at the University of Melbourne's Union Theatre, with 19 performers from six countries playing 50 different characters. It was a Belvoir and Kurinji co-production. It then played a return Sydney season at Carriageworks. ==Awards==

Shakthidharan's script was originally titled A Counting and Cracking of Heads, and was the joint winner of the 2015 NSW Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights. Counting and Cracking received seven 2019 Helpmann Awards including Best Play and Best New Australian Work and won best mainstage production at the 2019 Sydney Theatre Awards. It won both the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Drama at the 2020 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, with theatre director Eamon Flack credited as associate writer. In April 2020 Counting and Cracking won the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. ==Other works by the playwright==

Shakthi, who is co-founder and co-director of Kurinji theatre company in Sydney, has written other plays, written for film, and created video installations. Shakthi was co-founder and lead artistic consultant at Co-Curious From 2018 to 2021, sister company to CuriousWorks. CuriousWorks is a Western Sydney community arts organisation established as a start-up "committed to telling diverse community stories" in 2005 by S. Shakthidharan, where he was artistic director until 2018. He co-executive produced, with CuriousWorks and Cine Esperanza, the documentary Heart of the Fight: The Story of Dick Blair, a 30-minute documentary about Aboriginal pastor Richard Phillips, aka Dick Blair, Australian middleweight champion. Blair was a key figure in the establishment of Aboriginal-run social housing development The Block in Redfern, Sydney. He was also co-executive producer, with Lyn Norfor and Blake Ayshford, the 2022 anthology film Here Out West. He was a co-writer, with Nicole Reddy and Mithila Gupta, of the 2024 TV romance drama series Four Years Later. Other work includes VR project Laka (2018, Casula Powerhouse); AV experience The Other Journey (2011, 2013); dance/documentary work Zameen (2013); and hybrid theatre/dance work The Migrant Project (from 2005). ==References==