S. Shakthidharan enjoyed international success with his epic 2019 play Counting and Cracking about a Sri Lankan-Australian family across four generations. His latest stage work is a more intimate, 90-minute piece, featuring four performers. Co-produced with Melbourne Theatre Company, The Wrong Gods explores the tension between tradition and progress in a valley in India. The play delves into the relationship between a mother and her daughter as they navigate their conflicting desires against the enormous social upheaval brought about by the building of India’s enormous Narmada River dam project. Shakthidharan co-directs with Hannah Goodwin. The Melbourne production runs from 6 June.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

In a valley in India, paintings on a cave wall bear testimony to the presence of people – and their gods – for fifty thousand years. Close by, Nirmala farms the soil as her ancestors did, but her daughter Isha wants something more – a city education, and the opportunity it promises. And there are outsiders in the valley now, bringing new crops, new technologies, new visions of the future. There are new gods loose in the valley. But they are asking Nirmala and her people to pay a heavy price.

A gripping new play from S. Shakthidharan (Counting and Cracking, The Jungle and the Sea) co-directed by Hannah Goodwin (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Never Closer), The Wrong Gods melds mother-and-daughter struggle with the economics of progress, asking, what are we worshipping? And what price will we pay?