Counting and Cracking

Counting and Cracking is a play by Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan, first staged in 2019 in Sydney.

Synopsis
The play concerns four generations of the one Tamil family across Sri Lanka and Australia,  from 1956 to 2004. It was inspired by the playwright's own family story.

Productions
The play was first produced by Belvoir and Co-Curious at the Sydney Town Hall in January 2019 for the Sydney Festival, with artistic director of the Belvoir, Eamon Flack as director. It has a cast of 19 and runs for three and a half hours. The same production was then staged at the Adelaide Festival in March 2019. Both seasons sold out.

In August 2022, as part of the "UK/Australia Season", a collaboration between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Counting and Cracking toured to the UK, first at the Royal Lyceum as part of the Edinburgh Festival and then Birmingham Rep, as part of the Birmingham Festival. The cast featured 19 performers. The Times gave it a five-star review, while The Guardian and the Financial Times both gave four out of five.

From 31 May to 23 June 2024, the show was presented as part of the RISING: festival in Melbourne, at the University of Melbourne's Union Theatre with nineteen performers from six countries playing 50 different characters

In June 2024, the show will open at Carriageworks in Sydney, with most of the original cast.

Awards
Shakthidharan's script was originally titled A Counting and Cracking of Heads, and was the joint winner of the 2015 NSW Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights.

Counting and Cracking received seven 2019 Helpmann Awards including Best Play and Best New Australian Work and won best mainstage production at the 2019 Sydney Theatre Awards.

It won both the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Drama at the 2020 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, with theatre director Eamon Flack credited as associate writer.

In April 2020 Counting and Cracking won the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.