‘An epic drawn from real life’: the radical hit play about a Sri Lankan family’s journey

Theatre | The Guardian: 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.