New gods, old wounds

By Our Reporter
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Opening at Belvoir from 3 May to 1 June, and making its way to the Arts Centre Melbourne afterwards, The Wrong Gods may feature just four actors, but it doesn’t shrink from tackling large questions—questions of place, belonging, power, and cost

There’s a cave in a quiet Indian valley where the walls speak. Not in echoes or whispers, but through ancient strokes of ochre and charcoal, where the figures of people and their gods have watched over the land for fifty thousand years. Into this charged space, Belvoir’s The Wrong Gods brings a tight and urgent story of struggle, longing and upheaval—compressed into ninety potent minutes.

Following the acclaim for Counting and Cracking and The Jungle and the Sea, S. Shakthidharan returns with a production that feels more intimate in scale, but no less expansive in what it asks of its audience. Opening at Belvoir from 3 May to 1 June, and making its way to the Arts Centre Melbourne afterwards, The Wrong Gods may feature just four actors, but it doesn’t shrink from tackling large questions—questions of place, belonging, power, and cost.

At its centre is Nirmala, a woman farming the soil as her forebears did. The valley is her compass. But her daughter Isha is looking further afield, yearning for education, escape, a different kind of future. The tension between them is as old as the hills—and as immediate as the nearest town. Around them, outsiders move in, bringing change dressed as progress. New crops. New tools. New ambitions. And yes, new gods. Not of stone or sky, but of capital and influence. The audience is left to weigh whether the price of their arrival is worth paying.

Co-directed by Shakthidharan and Belvoir’s Resident Director Hannah Goodwin, the show leans into this tug-of-war with clarity and force. “We can now say that a show set in remote India can speak to us as Australians as much as anything else,” Shakthidharan said. That confidence is hard-won and well-earned. His earlier works cracked open assumptions about who gets to tell Australian stories—and who they’re for. The Wrong Gods continues that project, but now with fewer characters and sharper lines. The small cast—Manali Datar, Nadie Kammallaweera, Radhika Mudaliyar, and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash—carry the weight with agility and presence.

Eamon Flack, Belvoir’s Artistic Director, put it plainly: “This is a fine play of ideas, for fine actors. Here with just four actors and ninety minutes, Shakthi’s writing is even bigger than ever.” That might sound like a paradox—shrinking the frame to stretch the canvas—but it holds. Where earlier works sprawled across continents and generations, The Wrong Gods chooses its corner and digs in.

There’s a certain defiance in how the play resists easy binaries. It doesn’t romanticise the rural nor demonise the urban. It doesn’t pit modernity against tradition like some tired morality play. Instead, it lets both hold space, often uncomfortably, within each character. That discomfort is essential. It’s where the honesty lives.

The production design supports this layering of experience. Keerthi Subramanyam’s set and costume work gives the story a lived-in texture, neither timeless nor fixed in time. The original music by Sabyasachi (Rahul) Bhattacharya—drawing on Hindustani roots—adds depth rather than sentiment. It’s a production that knows when to step forward and when to stay out of the way.

Hannah Goodwin, co-director, summed up the invitation best: “Shakthi is one of the most exciting playwrights working in the country right now, so if you love new Australian writing this should be right at the top of your list.” It’s a statement of support, but also a challenge. To audiences. To institutions. To the cultural gatekeepers who still treat “Australian” as a narrow descriptor.

There’s something bold about setting a play in a remote valley in India and insisting it belongs in the heart of Sydney theatre. But The Wrong Gods doesn’t ask for permission. It just shows up—fully formed, clear-eyed, and quietly powerful.

Catch it while you can. Some plays announce themselves with a roar. Others arrive like footsteps through a cave—soft, steady, undeniable. This one does both.

The Wrong Gods

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