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When an unexpected act of destruction splits her family apart, Gowrie takes a radical vow of defiance: she blindfolds herself, refusing to see the world again until her loved ones are reunited. This sets the stage for one family’s epic journey to retain their dignity and safety, as they live through Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war.
Grand in scale and deeply human at its core, this touching work honours those who endured unimaginable loss – and upheld their capacity for love, connection and pride, even amid devastation. Built out of real-life testimonies from the war and woven through with elements of seminal Indian text the Mahābhāratha and the Greek myth of Antigone, The Jungle and the Sea is a theatrical epic of resilience and the pursuit of justice through love.
S. Shakthidharan is an Australian storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry. His plays Counting and Cracking, The Jungle and the Sea and The Wrong Gods have won critical, commercial and community acclaim. Counting and Cracking has toured extensively and won a New York Times Critics Pick. Gather Up Your World In One Long Breath, with Powerhouse Publishing, is his debut book. It will be accompanied by a year-long, companion artwork with the Museum. Shakthi’s debut feature film The Laugh of Lakshmi is currently in production, coming to cinemas in 2027. He has plays, TV series and multi-disciplinary works in development. He’s the Director of Kurinji, was previously Director of Co-Curious, and was Founder and Artistic Director of CuriousWorks from 2003-2018. Shakthi is a Creative Australia and Sidney Myer Fellow, and a recipient of the Phillip Parson’s and Kirk Robson awards. In 2026 he won the prestigious global Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama.
Eamon Flack is the Artistic Director of Belvoir St Theatre. He trained as an actor at WAAPA from 2001 to 2003 and has since worked as a director and writer around Australia and internationally, from the Tiwi Islands to Sri Lanka, London and New York. He has directed numerous award-winning productions for Belvoir, including Counting and Cracking with S. Shakthidharan (Helpmann Award for Best Play, Best New Australian Work, and Best Direction of a Play, Sydney Theatre Award for Best Play), Angels in America (Helpmann Award for Best Play), August: Osage County (Sydney Theatre Awards for Best Director and Best Show), and The Glass Menagerie (Helpmann Award for Best Play). His collaborations with S. Shakthidharan have won the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize, The Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting, and Victorian Premier's Prize for Drama. Eamon has adapted numerous works including Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, Hendrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Ivanov.
