> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://melbournestagereview.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # No safe distance: The Jungle and the Sea - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/no-safe-distance-the-jungle-and-the-sea/ - Published: 2026-08-23T08:06:06.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-23T09:39:17.000Z - Description: An epic story of war, displacement and moral choice becomes achingly intimate in S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack’s exceptionally powerful production. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews There are plays that invite themselves to be taken apart. [*The Jungle and the Sea*](https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2026/the-jungle-and-the-sea?ref=melbournestagereview.com), written and directed by S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack, makes me reluctant to even try. It isn't that there is little to say about this immense work. There is almost too much. Across nearly three hours with two intervals, a Tamil family is scattered by the Sri Lankan Civil War, and an intimate family story expands to hold displacement, faith, political violence, atrocity, migration, justice and grief. The play can be harrowing. It can also be funny. Perhaps it is the range that makes analysis feel strangely inadequate. *The Jungle and the Sea* moves between registers with the capaciousness of an epic tale: from the ferocity of war to the gentle squabbles of family life; from bodily suffering to exchanges that play out almost like intellectual chess, turning questions of justice, duty and moral responsibility over and over with a deep tolerance for nuance. And somehow, it holds. So rather than pull its many parts too far apart in interpretation, I want to stay close to the work, if I can. In the notes I wrote immediately after the performance — a sort of frenzied activity I call my ‘harvest’ — I find the same impulse expressed more instinctively: ‘better to nestle closer to the whole…’ The immediacy of this scrappy note tells my next-day writerly self something important about what this production achieved: the horrors of conflict were made intimate. The story had made these fictional people sufficiently present for me to grieve them, while their imagined lives brought me closer to the countless real people who lived through this war — individual lives so easily obscured by its statistics. \* \* \* Before history scatters them, *The Jungle and the Sea* gives us a family. They are loving, pluralistic and charmingly witty. Gowrie (Anandavalli), a Hindu, and Siva (Prakash Belawadi), a Christian, raise four children who grow into beliefs and lives of their own: Abi (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), Madhu (Nadie Kammallaweera), Ahilan (Shiv Palekar) and their youngest, Lakshmi (Emma Harvie). There is a fullness to the life the play establishes before war intrudes. Its characters have aspirations and vocations, faiths and romances, idiosyncrasies and hobbies. They dance, feed one another and delight in each other's company. Early in the play, the four siblings expend their energy almost frivolously, chasing one another around the stage. War arrives first as information. Leaflets fall from above, warning civilians to seek safety. Siva has been assured by a friend in government that places of worship will be protected, and he gathers family and friends in a Christian church. The assurance proves catastrophically wrong. The church is bombed. People are killed. Siva is blinded; his daughter Madhu loses all the fingers on her left hand, and with them her hopes of joining the Sri Lankan women's cricket team. After this, their son Ahilan is drawn into the Tamil Tigers and disappears from their lives. Siva and his youngest daughter, Lakshmi, make their way to Australia, while Gowrie remains in Sri Lanka with her other daughters, Abi and Madhu, searching for the son they have lost. Gowrie responds to this fragmentation with an extraordinary act of conviction: she binds her eyes, vowing that until she can see all of her children together, she will not see at all. Grief and injustice become a kind of embodied protest. She cannot prevent the war from tearing her family apart, but she can refuse to make peace with its rupture. For decades, the blindfold stays on. What began as a family moving freely through the world becomes a family moving because the world will no longer let them remain where they are. It is a story of displacement and forced migration, tragically familiar across wars, borders and eras. Even, and especially, our own. Yet the enormous scale of such displacement almost slips from view as I become absorbed in the fortunes of this one family. ![Three women embrace at one side of the revolve as another group gathers across the stage beneath a darkened blue set.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Nadie-Kammallaweera--Anandavalli-and-Kalieaswari-Srinivasan.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson.jpg) Nadie Kammallaweera, Anandavalli and Kalieaswari Srinivasan in The Jungle and the Sea. Photo: Pia Johnson Dale Ferguson’s deceptively simple set design gives this loss of freedom a physical form. He has constricted the broad Sumner stage into a suffocatingly narrow triangular playing space. Almost its entire floor is occupied by a revolve, which continues to turn for most of the production. The choreography is an absolute marvel to watch, with the actors continually adjusting to, travelling with and working against its motion. At first, it carries the family’s exuberance. As war closes in, walking becomes travelling, then displacement, then flight. Small, toy-like buses and trucks trundle alongside the actors; a plane passes overhead on a stick. The scale is playful, almost childlike, while the journeys grow increasingly gruelling. As the war progresses, the family walks and walks: towards safety, towards one another, away from danger, carrying the exhaustion of displacement in their bodies. In one sequence, a fellow traveller can go no further. He remains by the roadside, surrendering his water to those who can continue. Later, the revolve accelerates beneath the family already exhausted by their journey. They keep walking forward. The stage carries them backwards. The effect is used once. The cruelty of it lands. There is masterful economy to this theatrical language. Even Ferguson's strangely unfinished-looking walls seem to change under Damien Cooper's lighting: by lamplight, the mottled industrial surfaces almost become landscape: white blotches become distant lights on the horizon below an open sky. Arjunan Puveendran's live Carnatic score works its own transformations: veena, mridangam and voice conjure celebration and ritual, then turn the strike of a drum into bombardment, distant and overhead. Later, a torrent of rain seems to materialise from little more than fragments falling through the light. That economy extends to the performances, matched by the fluidity of the ensemble work. The actors continually form and reform as a collective while remaining vividly individual. We are held within the family, certainly, but also within the communities that gather around them and among the strangers who join them on the road — across political, religious and ethnic lines. And for a play touched so heavily by violence, anger, sorrow and injustice, few voices are raised. When a truly guttural shout finally tears through the production, deep into the work, it lands with startling force. This underlines the deft hand of directors S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack: a theatrical world of immense emotional range, held with remarkable restraint. The potency of these choices only accumulates. By the second interval, something has shifted in the auditorium. Usually an interval releases an audience: conversation rises, laughter breaks out, the ordinary social world rushes back in. Here, I became aware of how little I could hear. Around me, people spoke quietly, or sat in silence. I seemed to be one of many who could do little else but stare, dazed and a little transfixed, as a stage manager quietly swept the remnants of the storm from the floor. The room was intensely sober. \* \* \* The final act provides a beautiful complication to the violence we have so far experienced as something done *to* people. For much of *The Jungle and the Sea*, war has arrived in the family's lives as a vast external force: borders close, bombs fall, armies advance, laws change. Gowrie and her family are forced to survive the many decisions made elsewhere by people they will never meet. Now, morality becomes personal. The war may be ending, but its aftermath presents choices. What will each person concede to secure another's safety? What principles can survive contact with consequence? What does one owe the dead when honouring them may endanger the living? Peace itself begins to demand sacrifices, testing what each person is prepared to relinquish — and at what cost. At the centre of this is Abi, whose response to the war's final cruelties takes on a moral force of its own. Faced with a conflict between pragmatism and a deeply held conviction about what dignity requires, she refuses the easier path. Her insistence carries consequences, for herself and for those around her. There is something of her mother in this. Gowrie has spent fifteen years wearing her own refusal across her eyes. She could not stop the forces that scattered her children, but she could refuse to accommodate herself to their separation. Abi's conviction takes a different form, but carries the same steel. Neither woman possesses much power over the political forces around her. But that does not foreclose their capacity to choose what they feel is right. And still, beneath all this moral complexity, the family's original longing remains painfully simple: to be together. ![Gowrie stands under warm amber light with her hands raised to her face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/Anandavalli.-Photo-by-Pia-Johson.jpg) Anandavalli as Gowrie in The Jungle and the Sea. Photo: Pia Johnson And then the play returns to an image from its beginning. I don't want to describe what happens. Its power lies partly in the long journey back to something we have already seen without yet understanding. But for Gowrie, who has spent so many years refusing to see a world in which her children are separated, the production permits a moment of impossible wholeness. Tragedy and exquisite beauty seem to occupy the same breath. Anandavalli has us utterly in her hands. Her performance is sublime. Tears streamed down my cheeks. At curtain call, I was still crying. The audience rose in standing ovation. The company returned for a second bow, and then a third. As the performers finally jogged from the stage, a man in the audience called after them, his voice carrying what sounded to me like a South Asian accent: > “And when will you be performing for Benjamin Netanyahu?” It landed like a punch to the gut. For almost three hours, *The Jungle and the Sea* had held us inside the tyranny of war, and the particular obscenity of asymmetrical war. Then, just as the theatre seemed to offer some small possibility of resolution within tragedy, the present day pierces our cocoon. There was nothing safely 'historical' about this story anymore. --- [*The Jungle and the Sea*](https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2026/the-jungle-and-the-sea?ref=melbournestagereview.com) plays at [Melbourne Theatre Company's](https://www.mtc.com.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) Sumner Theatre until 12 September 2026.