The Wrong Gods
What does it take to choose your values and beliefs over those of others, and to fight for them? What does it take for a woman to be defiant – to go against what is expected of her, and perhaps even go against her own family?
Fresh off an international tour of his critically-acclaimed three-hour epic Counting and Cracking (which included a special sold-out season at Sydney’s Carriageworks), S. Shakthidharan returns to the Belvoir stage with another powerful chapter of South Asian history.
Detouring from the grand scale of Counting and Cracking and Shakthidharan’s follow-up show, The Jungle and the Sea, this restrained 90-minute fable is told through the perspectives of four defiant women, each of them shaped by differing values, ideologies, survival and sacrifice.
The Wrong Gods is a work of protest – it’s angry, sad, and deeply unsettled by the relentlessness of capitalism
The Wrong Gods imagines the protests surrounding the controversial Narmada Valley dam project. Initiated in the late 1980s, the dam is one of the world’s largest hydropower infrastructure projects. It was intended to supply electricity and drinking water to three Indian states, but its legacy is fraught – thousands of indigenous people and villagers were displaced, ecosystems were irreversibly altered and damaged, and the project remains at the centre of sustained protests.
Nirmala (Nadie Kammallaweera, who appeared in both Counting and Cracking and The Jungle and the Sea) a farmer and the head of the...