What happens on the way to opening night? It’s quite a drama

Playwright S. Shakthidharan has been eating a lot lately. For the celebrated creator of Counting and Cracking and The Jungle and the Sea, making a new work involves exhilaration, exhaustion and raging hunger. “I eat a lot during rehearsals because my brain just needs to be constantly motoring so quickly to so many people in so many different directions,” he says.

The Wrong Gods, which has its world premiere on May 3, centres on a mother and daughter living in a valley in India. Nirmala farms the soil as her ancestors did, but her daughter, Isha, yearns for the future that a city education will bring. The setting might be a small patch of India, but the play’s focus is the global impact of capitalism. A co-production from Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre and the Melbourne Theatre Company, it is described as “a thrilling, gripping tale full of hope, betrayal, tradition and self-discovery”.

Unlike the sweeping Counting and Cracking, with its 16 performers and shifting time zones, The Wrong Gods, which is co-directed by Shakthi and Hannah Goodwin, has a cast of four: Nadie Kammallaweera as Nirmala, Radhika Mudaliyar as Isha, Manali Datar as Devi and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash as Lakshmi. In the lead-up to opening night, the creative team recorded their thoughts as scenes were crafted, dialogue tested and changes wrought ...

Week 1

Shakthi (writer, co-director): It’s week one of rehearsals [and] I’m feeling very tired and very hopeful. It’s been a wonderful and very full week; [I’m] so in awe of these strong women playing these complex, contradictory characters who are trying to find ways to step into their own power. It’s been really interesting doing a show with four actors ... everything is so much more heightened and dramatic ... the stakes of the play are wrapped up inside each person, and the smallest change can change their entire world.

Hannah Goodwin, Shakthi and Radhika Mudaliyar in the early days of rehearsals.Credit: Brett Boardman

It’s been fascinating to do a play that’s so based upon our relationship with ... the natural world, and start looking at how we bring that into the theatre space, this idea of landscape and horizon and air and water, and it’s going to be an ongoing beautiful challenge ... making the theatre space feel different ... [I] feel like it’s transported us to somewhere else.

Manali Datar and Nadie Kammallaweera during rehearsals. Credit: Brett Boardman

Manali Datar (Devi): What initially struck me about this play, and what continues to be true, is the way it inspires my curiosity. In the first week, I’ve been spending so much time doing deep dives and research based on prompts from our co-directors and have been living in this world of endless questions.

Learning about the story our play is based on has challenged my perspectives on legacy and community and complicity and my relationship with nature and my own culture ...
What’s so great about theatre is its ability to “Narnia” us. You know, a door is opened, we enter, we live in an experience of that story, and it can only be accessed in that room. Once you leave the theatre wardrobe, the story you learned is superimposed on your reality, and you’ll never see your world the same way again ... This show and this rehearsal process is what I always hoped theatre-making would be.

“We move through space differently when we are moving as other people,” says Radhika Mudaliyar.Credit: Brett Boardman

Radhika Mudaliyar (Isha): At the end of week one, we have found some shapes between characters and shapes that kind of repeat between characters. There are also some spaces that we are unsure about in terms of where is the most resonant space, what the accents are. I think accent as physicality is one of the things that I’m interested in developing more because [it will] address how a lot of things change between characters ... we move through space differently when we are moving as other people.

Sabyasachi (Saby) Rahul Bhattacharya (composer): Composing music for The Wrong Gods has been a very novel experience. I started with online meetings with Shakthi and Hannah, followed by multiple readings of the script to identify key themes, characters, emotional plot points and specific scenes and moments where music would enhance the impact. When I came here for rehearsals, I could then connect the characters with the actors and their own unique style. Sitting through readings and runs of the play gave me more context to develop ideas around instrumentation, tempo and overall sound. I played the sarod [a traditional long-necked, plucked string instrument] for them last week so that we all could hear the sound textures and get their ideas as well.

As the days progressed, the concepts of the score became clearer – underscores, transitions and lyrics ... The decision to get the actors to sing specific parts of the score was a great idea, as they are trained singers. I am very excited about this, as it brings the music even closer to the characters.

Week 2

Hannah Goodwin (co-director): The highlight of week two for me was working alongside other key creatives like Nigel Poulton on movement and fight choreography and Laura Farrell on accent. Both the movement work and the accent work (which is a physical task in itself) are brilliant insights into the lived history of the characters, and when you are blessed with a brilliant cast like ours, it is a thrill to watch them build character through that work.

Co-director Hannah Goodwin: “Second pass is my happy place.″⁣Credit: Brett Boardman

We’ve done our first pass of the play on the floor, so we have a rough sketch of the overall shape. I have learned so many things and have a lot of new questions. I am looking forward to beginning our second pass next week. Second pass is my happy place.

Shakthi: It’s been such a different week to week one. We’ll be working on act two of the play, which is much more the mingling of these characters and their real lives with a mythic level and a godlike level to the work. It’s been both very fun and very difficult to find ways for the play to simultaneously be these ... godlike figures at the same time as these humans speaking to each other. And I think we’ve found a way to do that in the use of the space, how much space between people and how they use the stage, the way that you walk to each other and treat each other.

It’s also been a difficult week in terms of ... there’s a lot of argument in the play ... and then there’s a moment where people start to put down the masks we wear when we argue with someone who thinks differently to us, and just share their more deeply held truths. Staging that has been so interesting because ... there’s a tried and true theatrical way of [staging] this ... and actually, we’ve chosen a really different way, a way that’s more connected to the earth, a way that is more still, more genuine and open to their characters ... it took quite a lot of conversation to get there.

I had to go home last night and change a fair bit of the end of the script and the order of words, and then we have to talk more with the cast through each of the characters’ lenses and change again ... that stuff’s really difficult because for a moment, the surety with which the team feels you’re leading them suddenly dissipates, and there’s an unstable feeling ... we don’t know yet if we’ve solved it ...

Radhika Mudaliyar and Nadie Kammallaweera play a daughter and mother dealing with change in The Wrong Gods.Credit: Brett Boardman

We also did our first fight choreography, and it had a profound impact on the work. It’s really very powerful ... the way that our bodies work together can be as much a part of the storytelling as what they say to each other, and what our body stores from that, what it lets go, how our body changes the way we might talk ...

Week 3

Shakthi: This week has been really tricky for me. I had to use both my hats as a writer and co-director, and constantly swap between the two. And there’s always this point in rehearsals where things start to unravel, necessarily, one question about one character kind of leads to another question about other characters. And as a writer, you start to wonder if the foundation of the script is falling apart, and it’s a really interesting moment in the process ... you have to gather yourself and remember to believe in the work and process all the changes.

“The actors are starting to ... inhabit the belief systems of their characters,” says Shakthi.Credit: Brett Boardman

In this show, every script change has a bigger effect because the show is made up of two scenes that happen in real time, and there’s only four actors who only play one character each. Every change affects their character trajectory. And there’s been this really beautiful thing that happens where ... the actors are starting to ... inhabit the belief systems of their characters ... each actor is putting forward thoughts that come from the belief system of their character. And they’re really cogent and strong.

The reason it’s tricky but good is because it’s work which involves four equally good points of view on a massive situation with life-and-death stakes for thousands of people, but everyone’s argument about what to do next is good. It’s a very intense process for someone who’s both a writer and a co-director because you’re kind of there for the team, but also have to do all this work inside your own brain simultaneously.
I eat a lot during rehearsals because my brain just needs to be constantly motoring so quickly to so many people in so many different directions.

And so, yeah, that’s been week three, like the very meaty, juicy act two, and the thousands of little cuts and the thousands of little changes, and the thousands of little shifts that every actor has to go through in order to accommodate those changes, and the thousands of little moves my brain has to do at the same time. But that’s theatre, baby. That’s how it works.

Week 4

Shakthi: It always gets a bit scary around now – you feel like it’s not possible that the show will be ready in two weeks – but I’m not frightened because that’s how it always feels. And in fact, it would be a bit of a worry if we felt we were ready now. This week, we got together to play and we figured out how to end it ... and that’s always nice. You never want to do it too much because you want to let the play get you there, and the actors have to feel it in their bodies. But it was nice to touch on it.

Radhika Mudaliyar, Nadie Kammallaweera (standing), Vaishnavi Suryaprakash and Manali Datar created a “safer room”, says writer and co-director Shakthi.Credit: Brett Boardman

Theatre that I love ... is really about getting to its final conversations. And it occurred to me that so much of general life discourse, whether that be mass media or social media or even actually these days, sadly, the way we talk to each other in our offices or across the fence with our neighbours, is caught up in the noise ... there’s a lot of urgency and catastrophe at the moment, and it felt good to be doing a show where we use the form of theatre to find a way to get past the urgency and deep into, how did we get to this point, and how do we get ourselves out of it? [It’s] so difficult to have that kind of conversation in everyday life. And I really feel like theatre is one of the last places in the world where you can do that.

And my last thought about this week is, it’s just been so great to be surrounded by so many brilliant women. You know, something we really wanted to do with this project, and whether it’s costumes, set and wardrobe, that team ... or Hannah or the cast, our stage management team, our voice coach, our producers are all women, and I’m just so pleased about it. It feels like a safer room. It feels like a room in which people can be more easily vulnerable. When I work with men ... we have to work towards [vulnerability]. And there’s something about the kind of ease with which this room sits with its emotions, moves through them, goes on to the next thing, that’s just lovely. And it can be silly or it can be deep and I’ve just enjoyed watching that. It’s great learning from women.

The Wrong Gods is at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, May 3 - June 1 and Melbourne Theatre Company, June 6 - July 12.