“Australia is a country of immigrants,” says Counting and Cracking director Eamon Flack. He’s not wrong: nearly 60% of the population are immigrants from Europe who began arriving about 250 years ago; Indigenous people make up just over 3%. After England, the top countries where overseas-born immigrants come from are India and China. Yet until Counting and Cracking, there hadn’t been a major theatrical work in Australia about a non-white migrant family. “To put it plainly, I don’t think there’s been a play of this scale with 19 people who are all brown,” says the play’s creator S Shakthidharan, known as Shakthi.
Shakthi, an Australian storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry, has more than made up for that with Counting and Cracking. The play, which made its sell-out debut at Sydney Town Hall in 2019, spans four generations of a Sri Lankan Australian family over nearly half a century in two countries. Featuring more than 50 characters played by 16 actors in three languages, it won seven Helpmann awards (Australia’s answer to the Oliviers), beating international mega-hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now the production is on its way to the UK where it will take audiences in Edinburgh and Birmingham through this affecting, and surprisingly funny, multi-generational tale of love, family secrets, civil war and migration.
