It’s ironic The Wrong Gods, a work by Tamil playwright S. Shakthidharan set in India, should open the same night as that country fired missiles into Pakistan.

Shakthidharan, who goes by the name Shakthi, has made his name writing theatre about the bloody civil war of his parents’ Sri Lanka, notably the multi-awarded and critically acclaimed Counting and Cracking and its follow-up The Jungle and the Sea.

This latest work is about a war of a different kind, that between a mother and daughter, the old ways and the new and nature versus supposed progress in a remote rural village alongside a mighty river in India’s Narmada Valley.

Shakthidharan’s two Sri-Lankan based stories are epics. While Counting and Cracking, originally mounted as part of the 2019 Sydney Festival, unfolds across three acts, five decades and four generations with 16 actors, this is almost the opposite: one location, two scenes and a cast of four women.

While both previous works were lengthy (Counting ran to three-and-half hours) this is a tight 90-minute, no-interval drama. Instead of working in collaboration with Belvoir’s Artistic director Eamon Flack, this time it’s Belvoir’s Resident Director Hannah Goodwin (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Never Closer) co-directing.