By Adam Rafferty
After the massive success of their multi Helpmann Award winning play Counting and Cracking, anticipation for the writer-director team of S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack to bring another meticulously detailed Sri Lankan-Australian production to the stage was high. This time around, in The Jungle and The Sea (first staged at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 2022) they have chosen to develop a story that is epic in scale, telling the tale of one family’s experiences of the Sri Lankan Civil War, using both classic Greek tragedy – Sophocles’ Antigone – and ancient poetry – the massive Mahābhāratha – as a source of structural inspiration. This has given the play an enormously ambitious scope, which for the most part it absolutely stands the test of through the superb quality of its prose.
Set wholly on an open stage with a large revolving plate in its centre (design by Dale Ferguson), which is surrounded by walls, evocative of typically worn-by-nature Sri Lankan buildings, with only a few pieces of furniture and props occasionally used to create ‘place’. Otherwise, everything is left to the extraordinarily strong cast to develop a sense of location as the revolve almost incessantly spins on.
At the opening we meet the family of mother Gowrie (Anandavalli) and father Siva (Prakash Belawadi), their son Ahilan (Shiv Palekar) and three daughters: Abi (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), Madhu (Nadie Kammallaweera) and Lakshmi (Emma Harvie) as they navigate the busy streets of Jaffna, play cricket and tease one another – Lakshmi for her atheist views, Abi for the romantic advances made to her by her beau Himal (Rajan Velu). This ever-moving, constantly overlapping interaction is directed with virtuosic skill that creates a real sense of the bustle of the cultural capital of the Tamil community on the northern tip of Sri Lanka’s tear drop island. The perfect balance in storytelling clarity that Shakthidharan and Flack achieve with a relatively small cast is admirable. This little household is reflective of the typically wide cultural and religious mix of families in Sri Lanka. Gowrie is Hindu, while Siva is Christian and Abi’s boyfriend is Buddhist.
When they get word that the Sri Lankan army is looking to drive the militant separatist Tamil Tigers out of the area, Siva gets word that places of worship will be safe, but a tragic attack leaves him blind and his family wounded. Ahilan is convinced to join the Tamil Tigers against his family’s wishes, leaving Siva devastated and blaming himself for the situation. Amidst the conflict, Gowrie sends her now debilitated husband with daughter Lakshmi to safety in Australia and blindfolds herself vowing not to remove her eye covering until her entire family is once again reunited.
In the intervening fourteen years, Lakshmi studies to become a lawyer in Sydney, while Gowrie, Abi and Madhu are buffeted by the civil war back at home in Sri Lanka, ultimately walking the length and breadth of the island to escape the conflict and in hopes of finding Ahilan.
This is where the revolve becomes key to the storytelling, creating the constant sense of being on the move and never standing still – the cast must easily meet their daily step count on the stage each night! The revolve is used in many other masterful ways to indicate travel that are delightful to see and bring thematic styling to the play. It’s difficult to tell if the revolve is deliberately creaky, reflective of the rough-shod nature of many Sri Lankan constructions, or if it’s just a particularly noisy set piece, but it is quite distracting at times and revolves have been achieved much more noiselessly by MTC in the past.
Helping to drown out the clatter are two onstage musicians (Arjunan Puveendran and Hari Sivanesan) playing beautiful traditional Carnatic music and chanting that perfectly evokes a feeling of place and serves to provide tension and intrigue along with the equivalent of sound effects for gunshots and bombing. This is supported by superb sound design by Steve Francis that expertly creates a sense of both the outdoors and the indoors in such an open space.
Perhaps the classics that have been referenced by this production are the reason behind its 2 hours and 50 minutes run-time, with two intervals, but on reflection it’s hard to see that this length is truly necessary. Yes, it gives the audience the time to truly get to know this family and understand their situation, but there are scenes that seem superfluous to the overall story, regardless of how beautifully they’re told. Lakshmi’s coming out to her father being a clear example. The emotional throughline of the storytelling also seems to falter in the third act, as Lakshmi’s return to Sri Lanka results in an indifferent reunion with her mother and sisters, at least in how it is played, before she’s sent back to Australia while off-stage, only to return to Sri Lanka again for another unemotional reunification with her ‘Amma’.
This is countered though by some truly profound and emotionally impactful revelations by Gowrie as she explains to her atheist daughter that God can be found in many things. Anandavalli’s stoic performance and truly beautiful bookending of the play with traditional Bharatnatyam dance, which she has choreographed, leaves the kind of lasting impression that all true classics should. The Jungle and The Sea is an emotionally impactful story beautifully told, but requires stamina, especially for an unfamiliar audience.
