A breakaway success at the Sydney Festival in 2019, the show went on to win seven Helpmann awards. It is set to open the Rising Festival at the new Melbourne University Union Theatre, starring Victorian College of the Arts graduate Kaivu Suvarna before heading back to Sydney.

Dorian and Counting and Cracking are highly original productions and speak to the quality of Australian theatre.

Eustis, one of America’s most admired theatre executives who helped launch Hamilton off-Broadway, praised Counting and Cracking as a “magnificent play and production”.

“Even more impressive for me was the story of how it was created,” he told this masthead. “Belvoir is one of those rare theatres that doesn’t just produce plays, they bring art into the world that wouldn’t exist without them. I’m honoured to be partnering with them.”

Theatre producer Michael Cassel played matchmaker, introducing Eustis on a visit to Sydney last year to Belvoir Street Theatre’s Eamon Flack, who asked Eustis to read the script.

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“I’m not a very conniving person and Oskar is a bit of a hero of mine but I knew that if he just read it, I was pretty sure that he would like it,” Flack said.

The entire 19-member cast of Counting and Cracking will travel to New York for its September run.

“We haven’t been to New York for over a decade, and the last couple of times was under our own steam,” Flack said. “The Public rarely picks up a wholesale show from outside the United States, let alone from the southern hemisphere and Australia.”

“It seems ridiculous and crazy,” playwright and associate director Shakthi Shakthidharan said. “This is such a big show that’s coming out of Australia and we’ve never done anything like this before but there’s never been so much love for our show.

“It shows a community in all its glorious complexity. And, you know, it doesn’t sugar-coat or try and present us as model minorities. It just talks about who we really are.

“The story that happened in Sri Lanka is being played out all over the world. What the play explores is the politics of division and how that might be useful for politicians to win power. But it has disastrous consequences on public society that lasts for decades and can eventually lead to violence.”

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