Siddhartha or 'Sid' is a media studies student who lives in Coogee, where the air smells of 'salty sea and beer' and he discusses Baudrillard with his law student girlfriend.
"How can you study 'studies'?" his Sri Lankan mother wonders exasperated. In his other life, he is Radha's son from Pendle Hill in western Sydney which smells of 'mustard seeds and masalas', and from where he is regularly summoned back for family business. Business like scattering his grandmother's ashes in the Georges river.
"It looks pretty green. This is probably illegal," a reluctant Sid (played by Shiv Palekar) moans as he strips down to robes to perform the ceremony at the river.
"Kunthavi Aunty did her mother's funeral rites here and said it was fine," Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera) snaps back.
The Hindu priest (Gandhi MacIntyre) ends the solemn ritual, by noting he needs to pop into Woolies.
"You should try the Aldis at Bankstown, their prices are much better," Radha advises as they shuffle offstage in the opening scene of the joint Belvoir and Co-Curious production Counting and Cracking, hilariously capturing the tension and contradiction of immigrant life, where the sacred and secular collide in everyday life and is re-formulated for new worlds.
Marrying the high production values of Belvoir, with the gifts of Sri Lankan-Australian playwright S.Shakthidharan, Counting and Cracking speaks to the thirst for deeper stories touching on contemporary themes of asylum, diaspora, migration and family.
A scene from Counting and Cracking. Source: Brett Boardman
Spoken in language, weaving Tamil with English translations, the play directed by Belvoir's Eamon Flack, offers the audience an opportunity to enter into the world of a Sri Lankan refugee family, without diluting it, shifting across generations and countries seamlessly.
A call from Sri Lanka unlocks a family secret that sees the play shifts from modern day Australia, to a grand family home in Colombo on the eve of Sri Lanka's 1983 civil war, exploring the impact of war on four generations of a family - through love, exile and tragedy.
For Shakthidharan, who is also the artistic director of western Sydney production house Co-Curious, the fictional play has been 10 years in the making, rooted in a hunger to learn more about his mother's homeland and history.
"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," he said.
"It's a story in which migrants are not asked to discard part of themselves to fit in, but instead are asked to present their full selves, to expand our idea of what this country can be."
There are times when the three-hour strong, two-interval production could have used some pruning, but the standing ovation proved the audience was here for it. Writing is the strength of the production, providing an opportunity for the stellar talents of the all-people of colour cast to shine, including NIDA graduate Shiv Palekar, SBS's Safe Harbour star Hazem Shammas, Prakash Belawadi and Kammallaweera.
The production augurs well for the future of Australian storytelling, a win for representation and investing in diverse talent—offering familiarity and catharsis for South Asian viewers and insight for Anglo audiences, but ultimately coming up trumps as simply a cracking, well-executed yarn.
'Counting and Cracking' will be performed at Sydney's Town Hall from January 11 to February 2 and at the Adelaide Festival, March 2 to March 9.
