When S. Shakthidharan first told his mum that he wanted to look into their family history, she quickly shut him down, telling him: "That is a very stupid idea."
She then refused to talk to him about it again.
Anandavalli, a Tamil dancer, fled Sri Lanka in 1983 at the outbreak of the civil war, settling with her family in Western Sydney.
It was 2008 and, faced with a wall of silence from his mum, Shakthidharan (also known as Shakthi) secretly turned to a grand-aunt in London.
"She was the first person in my family to open up to me and it became a waterfall of information. I started learning about all these things that I'd never known. It was overwhelming," he told ABC RN's The Stage Show.
Then in 2010, against his mother's wishes, Shakthi visited family in Sri Lanka and learnt that his great-grandfather had been the only Tamil politician in the country's post-independence government (Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, was part of the British Empire until 1948) .
"That was the lightbulb moment when I realised that my family's story, that was hidden from me, was also my country's story."
Shakthi worked these stories into his debut play, Counting and Cracking, and emailed the first draft to his mum.
Anandavalli didn't reply.
But to Shakthi's surprise, she accepted an invitation from Belvoir's artistic director Eamon Flack to attend a development workshop for the play in 2014.
"Strangers to her, actors, would ask her questions and to my astonishment she would reply, things she would never reply to me, because you can't deny a stranger," Shakthi recalls.
"They'd ask her a question about leaving Sri Lanka and she'd say something like: 'If I'd stayed for two more weeks, we wouldn't have left.'"
As Shakthi began weaving Anandavalli's revelations into the script, he started to understand why she was so reluctant to speak.
"It broke her heart when that country broke and the only way she could deal with that pain was by burying it, never talking about it again.
"[The play] was forcing her to open up something she put away in a bottle decades earlier, and she didn't want to reopen herself to that pain. But the play did it, the play did what our relationship couldn't — and it's allowed her to heal her relationship with Sri Lanka."
After a decade of work, Counting and Cracking — directed by Flack, with Anandavalli as a costume and cultural advisor — premiered in 2019, in a large-scale production that turned Sydney Town Hall into a temporary theatre space.
The epic family drama won 14 major awards, including seven Helpmanns and the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature (Australia's richest literary prize).
In August this year, Counting and Cracking opened to rave reviews at the Edinburgh International Festival and Birmingham Festival.
The team's follow-up play, The Jungle and the Sea, opened at Belvoir this week — and this time, Anandavalli stars.
When Flack approached Anandavalli about playing Gowrie, the matriarch at the centre of the play (who spends most of it blindfolded), she thought he was "cuckoo".
"I never dreamt that I would end up doing my debut acting role at the age of 65 on a revolving stage, blindfolded," she told ABC News Breakfast.
"The fact that these two young boys [Shakthi and Flack] … who are very smart and very good at what they do, have got a huge passion for the art form, and a great truth in what they do — that is what tipped the scales; that together they believed this old woman could do it."
Australia's untold stories
Anandavalli was a child prodigy in Bharatanatyam (an Indian classical dance form that originated in Tamil Nadu), touring Europe and Asia as a teenager.
She retired from dancing when she got married, however, only returning to it after her divorce, when she formed independent dance company Lingalayam from her Western Sydney garage.
Shakthi says: "I just grew up with the sound of carnatic music and dance bells, that's normal to me. I get sleepy when I hear those sounds because that's what my silence is."
At university, Shakthi resisted family pressure to study medicine or law, instead studying journalism.
"Journalism was the closest thing that could still sound to my parents like it was a real job, that involved storytelling," he recalls.
But throughout his studies he played guitar in a rock band, and towards the end of his degree, he found himself drawn to the arts.
"It's all my mum's fault, to be honest. I'd felt, ever since hanging around that stage as a kid with her, that the stage was a special place. I like it because it's where anything can happen, anything is possible.
Shakthi founded community arts organisation CuriousWorks in 2005.
"The Australian life that I live — I had never seen in our films, I don't see it on stage. [CuriousWorks' mission was:] Let's just go tell Australia's untold stories, its migrant stories, its refugee stories.
"But then I realised that the industry is systemically opposed to telling those stories and … [instead] it's stuck to a very few postcodes and a few small communities. So I realised that we had to actually build a system for how communities could tell their own stories."
That has involved going out looking for young, talented storytellers and cultural leaders in Western Sydney, and nurturing them to make their own work. Results included multi-year, themed arts projects, such as The Migrant Project and Beyond Refuge.
Founded in 2018, CuriousWorks' sister company Co-Curious expanded the company's brief to include large-scale stage and screen projects, including Counting and Cracking and the anthology film Here Out West, which premiered at Sydney Film Festival in November.
"Community arts is a process for recovering humanity. So much of the world is about turning us into numbers or putting us in boxes — and community arts just lets people step out of that," says Shakthi.
Belvoir's biggest production ever
In his late 20s, having spent years helping others to tell their stories, Shakthi turned to his own.
"I started to realise that I couldn't actually have a future unless I knew my past properly," he says.
"I'd been immersed in the artistic life of our people and none of the actual stories of our people, and I felt a hole inside of me … I actually had to turn it [the storytelling] on myself, which was a deeply terrifying but also liberating decision because, to be honest, I should have done it years earlier."
Shakthi spent five years developing Counting and Cracking before, at a reading of a few scenes at Sydney's Carriageworks (where he was an associate artist from 2013 to 2015), he met Belvoir's Eamon Flack.
Flack tells ABC Arts: "I thought, here was a story that I just hadn't seen in our corner of the art world before … I hadn't seen that sort of weaving of big thinking, politics and love story, in Australian writing in that way."
Flack and Shakthi started collaborating in 2013, working on the play as a co-production between Belvoir and CuriousWorks (and later Co-Curious).
"Normally, in theatre, you're trying to corral a thing into a more achievable scale, for a budget," says Flack.
"But on this one, we just thought, 'Fuck it, this has got to be done properly, let's just let it get bigger.'"
By the time Counting and Cracking (dedicated to Shakthi's late grand-aunt) opened at the Sydney Town Hall as part of the 2019 Sydney Festival, it had become Belvoir's biggest production ever.
Audiences were treated to Sri Lankan food before and during intervals for the three-and-a-half-hour play, which featured 19 performers, including 16 actors and three musicians, from six countries. It also played at the 2019 Adelaide Festival.
Counting and Cracking opens in 2004 with Radha, a Tamil woman living in Western Sydney, and her Australian-born son Siddhartha, who are scattering the ashes of Radha's recently deceased mother in the Georges River. But we learn that her father's ashes have remained under the bed for the past 21 years, for reasons Siddhartha does not yet understand.
An unexpected phone call from Sri Lanka transports the audience back in time, where we encounter four generations of their family and witness the opening salvos of the civil war that will change their lives.
Counting and Cracking's cast members spoke English, Tamil, Singhalese, Arabic and Yolngu Matha. Shakthi and Flack spent years casting the show, travelling across Australia and then to Sri Lanka, Singapore and India.
Funding it was an epic effort: Flack says Belvoir and Co-Curious ended up building relationships with 46 key individuals and funders, from major festivals to private donors.
Shakthi says: "A number of unusual and unlikely opportunities were strung together to make writing a work like this a possibility."
That includes the now-defunct Young Artists Initiative grant from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Flack says: "I think we'd probably struggle to get Counting and Cracking up in the current climate, both in terms of just the general economic climate but also I do think that maybe the arts is operating beyond its limits at the moment."
'An Australian story'
Shakthi says that the Sydney Town Hall was almost a sacred space.
"For me, what a sacred space is, is where many truths can gather and I think that's what the best theatre should be."
He says the ensembles of both Counting and Cracking and its follow-up, The Jungle and the Sea, bring together Sri Lankans from different religions and ethnicities to talk about their country's issues.
"It really became a project which helped heal us [the Sri Lankan community] and pave the way for the future."
Australian actor Rajan Velu — whose background is Tamil Indian — is in The Jungle and the Sea, and also appeared in the original production of Counting and Cracking.
He tells ABC Arts that Counting and Cracking has been healing for his Sri Lankan friends and family, across ethnicities and religions: "This play allowed them to open up and actually speak within their family about things that happened, because they saw it on stage."
After the first run in Sydney, a person close to Velu told him about losing her brother in the 1983 Black July riots that are depicted in the play.
Velu, who spent a decade appearing in US TV shows (including bit roles in Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Scandal) had never auditioned for a play that had a South Asian story.
"I thought it was fascinating that Belvoir was taking on this project which was essentially going to put 16 brown actors and three musicians on stage," he recalls.
Emma Harvie, whose background is Burgher Sri Lankan, is in The Jungle and the Sea as well as this year's UK cast of Counting and Cracking.
She was also part of a reading at an early workshop for the first play, where she remembers thinking: "Oh, this is written for brown people and it is an Australian story, as well as a Sri Lankan story.
"I went home and told my family, 'You have to see this, all our family and friends have to see this. It's about your history' … they've lived here for 50 years and never seen a South Asian story on stage like this."
Velu says: "A lot of people were like, 'Oh, is this like a little community play?' I was like, 'No, it's on the main stage.'"
Counting and Cracking was a critical and commercial hit, with performances selling out in Sydney.
Shakthi is surprised by how it's been embraced by wider Australian audiences.
"[It represented] a very private part of our lives [that] we put it out in public for the first time, and to be publicly vulnerable — and have that be accepted — actually engendered a deep feeling of belonging," he says.
"It felt like our story was part of the Australian story in a very mainstream way."
Shakthi says that things have changed in the industry since he started out.
"I am a hundred per cent certain there is more access … But I think we're only at the beginning of that change. It's slow going and requires constant activism."
'Unfinished business'
The Jungle and the Sea, which is co-written and co-directed by Shakthi and Flack, returns to the Sri Lankan civil war.
"There was definitely unfinished business. Counting and Cracking was about the build-up to the civil war and I wrote that really in honour of those who tried to halt its descent into violence," says Shakthi.
"The other side of that story is the people who lived through the war."
It's a smaller-scale piece told entirely in English with eight actors — more than half of which, including Velu and Harvie, appeared in Counting and Cracking — and unfolds on a constantly evolving stage.
After a brief contemporary epilogue, it begins in 1995 on a beach in north Sri Lanka where a Tamil family are playing cricket.
Shakthi says this scene re-creates the "idyllic" Sri Lanka that his mother grew up in: a warm, free, multi-religious and multi-ethnic community.
But soon that idyll is shattered by the violence of the civil war, and the family is torn apart.
While the father and one daughter end up in Australia, mother Gowrie and her two other daughters stay in Sri Lanka, in a bid to reunite with the son who has been recruited by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Anandavalli sees her character, Gowrie, as a banyan tree: "You have these roots coming down and that's what she [Gowrie] expects — those roots to take, to grow into the soil and be there. But suddenly, all these branches are just whacked down, one by one," she told ABC News Breakfast.
The play does not shy away from the violence perpetrated by both the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government during the war.
Anandavalli says that while she found working on Counting and Cracking a healing experience, The Jungle and the Sea has been more of a challenge.
"It's been really triggering, it's been very emotional, because this was not a situation I wanted to know about."
Shakthi says: "The history we look at [in The Jungle and the Sea] is more recent and I think the conversations are trickier for the Sri Lankan community to face. But what's really beautiful about that is, I think we're ready for it because of Counting and Cracking."
Alongside the violence, there is grit and humour.
"So much of the mediated images of war are about helpless, often mostly brown, people at the mercy of history and fate and political leaders," says Shakthi.
"[But] underneath all that is actually thousands of people making decisions every second and surviving and loving and living and cracking jokes, and being fools and being heroic. And I wanted to occupy that space for this show."
The Jungle and the Sea draws on The Mahābhārata, which Shakthi had read as a kid, as well as Sophocles's Antigone, which Flack has loved for decades.
Shakthi told ABC News Breakfast: "We looked at the way that these ancient texts could teach us things about how ordinary people live extraordinary lives and how we cope with loss."
Delayed by the pandemic, The Jungle and the Sea now reaches our stages in the wake of a particularly turbulent year for Sri Lanka.
"I think we can offer a very positive contribution to the conversation for a country that's at a crossroads right now about who it is and where it wants to go," says Shakthi.
"I really hope that this play helps us turn an open heart to our recent past, in a way that helps us build a future that's more reconciled and more positive."
Anandavalli says this is a show that everyone needs to see.
"Because this story is not just Sri Lanka's story, it is a story that's happening all over the world. And we have to put a stop to it … art has the healing power to show them and these politicians this [war and violence] should not happen."
The Jungle and the Sea runs until December 18 at Belvoir St Theatre.
