They come from all over the world, but they are unified. They are not just brilliant actors, they believe in the purpose of the play in the particular act of storytelling we are undertaking.
How much does it help that you have such a strong cast? No matter how many times I witness that moment, it still seems like a miracle to me that theatre can do something like that. The arc of history bends towards a humble family just trying to reunite.
In the final moments of the play time collapses.
What is your favourite moment in the play? I learnt that my mother never spoke about Sri Lanka when I was growing up because she still hadn’t dealt with the pain of separating from her homeland. What didn’t I learn? I learnt that my great-grandfather was a politician as well as a mathematician. It is a quote from my great-grandfather: “Democracy is the counting of heads within certain limits, and the cracking of heads beyond those limits.” And it’s a line in the play.ĭid you learn anything new while writing it? Vaishnavi Suryaprakash in Counting And Cracking (Photo: Brett Boardman) It is an epic mosaic drawn from the stuff of real life. How much of it is based on real incidents?Ĭounting and Cracking is ultimately a work of fiction. In telling this one family’s story over four generations, it is also the story of two countries: Sri Lanka post-independence, and Australia as an immigrant nation. It is a story of mathematics and courtship, of cricket and politics, of a box of ashes hidden under a bed for 21 years. I wrote it to give my community a chance to confront our shared past, toĬounting and Cracking is the story of a son uncovering from his mother, her long held secrets of forbidden love and courage against oppression. I wrote it to unashamedly condemn the politics of division. I wrote it to help kids talk to their parents and unlock the hidden universes inside them. I wrote Counting and Cracking to honour my elders and everyone in Sri Lanka who tried to halt my homeland’s descent into civil war. I began writing because I was seduced by these possibilities. A good story can reflect the world back to us in all its glorious complexity and give us the space to deeply understand ourselves and each other. Stories have the power to change how we think and feel about the world – and therefore how we behave. I have always been fascinated by stories. It adds to an interesting body of creative work across different mediums for him.Įastern Eye caught up with the Australian storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry to discuss writing, his award-winning theatre play and important lessons we can all learn from it. His multi-layered story performed in English, Tamil, and Sinhalese (with live translation into English), already looks like being one of the most unique and powerful theatre events of the year. The deeply personal show featuring 19 performers from six different countries was researched, developed, and written across 10 years by S Shakthidharan, who is also an associate director. This new array, is a fully sorted version of the original array of unsorted numbers.The multi-generational play, Counting and Cracking, follows a Sri-Lankan Australian family over four generations from 1956 to 2004, as it tells a moving story of love, political strife, home, exile, breakup, and reunion. After completing the counts array, we iterate over the whole thing, cumulatively summing up all the count values inside it.įinally, by using a little formula we are able to correctly determine the index of each number, within a newly created array of size n, where n is the number of digits in the original array. We then count the number of times instances of each number that appears in the array, and store this count value in the list we just created. We then use this number to generate a list of size of max number + 1. The first pass is required to find the max number in the list. It makes several passes over the list of numbers through out the sorting process. Instead, the Counting sort uses a rather intriguing and intricate way of correctly judging the positions of each value in the list. These types of sorts are known as non-comparison based sorts. The Counting Sort Algorithm belongs to the Category of sorting algorithms which do not require comparisons between values.