A Sri Lankan tale of courage and connection

A new production, The Jungle and the Sea for Belvoir Street Theatre will see the company’s artistic director Eamon Flack and Sri Lankan writer and director S. Shakthidharan team together for the first time since 2019’s record breaking and multi Helpmann award-winning Counting and Cracking.

This time around Flack and Shakthidharan have co-written the play and will be co-directing an international ensemble of mainly South East Asian heritage.

“Eamon and I come from different parts of the theatre industry,” Shakthidharan, co-writer and co-director said.

“He has decades of experience in main stage theatre and I have decades of experience in communities telling their own stories, but we both love the same kinds of storytelling and share the same values arounds its purpose.”

The story of The Jungle and the Sea is framed through text from two worlds, the Hindu epic, Mahabharata and the ancient Greek tale of Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus.

Set at the time of the dreadful Sri Lankan civil war, or maybe any war, The Jungle and the Sea focusses on a mother trying to hold her family together as its members go missing one by one.

“It is about the courage and strength and resilience of humans to fight for survival,” Nadie Kammallaweera, actor, said.

“It is a story about how humans hold onto hope, and how they try to see through cracks and holes even when death is imminent.”

Nadie previously worked with the creative team in Counting and Cracking, and in this production  she plays two characters, one as a daughter (Madhu) of the main family, and secondly as Devala ma, a venerable old woman who lives away from humans in the jungle, and a role that is important to the latter part of the play.

“She manages to walk a long way through war with courage, without giving up the hope of a world full of freely flying birds and flowering trees,” Kammallaweera said.

“I hope a general Australian audience fall in love with the family at the centre of this show and sees their own family in it,” Shakthidharan said.

“I hope it collapses the gap between “us” and “them” and that they leave the theatre remembering there is only “us”.

The Jungle and the Sea brings together a stellar cast of Sri Lankan, Indian and New Zealand actors including Kalleaswari Srinivasan, who worked with Peter Brook on his final show and dancer and guru Anandavalli, who for this show is collaborating with her Sydney based company Lingalyam.

The show also includes Bollywood legend, journalist, activist and Helpmann award winner Prakash Belawadi.

November 12 – December 18

Upstairs, Belvoir Street Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills

belvoir.com.au