A new play has arrived in Melbourne that refuses to romanticise the past or give easy answers about the future. The Wrong Gods, written by S. Shakthidharan, is now playing at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio until 12 July. After a widely praised run with Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, the production brings its lean, poetic intensity to Victorian audiences, asking difficult questions about belief, inheritance, and the price of modernity.
This isn’t Shakthidharan’s first hit. After the sweeping success of Counting and Cracking, which earned accolades across Australia and abroad, the writer returns with a far more intimate but no less political work. Set in a remote Indian valley untouched for millennia by outside conquest, the play centres on a mother-daughter relationship: Nirmala, who is rooted in tradition, and her daughter Isha, who longs for the world beyond.
The simplicity of the setup is deceptive. What begins as a family story quickly unspools into something much larger, as the arrival of a stranger disrupts not just a household, but an entire way of life. The valley is not a metaphor for anything—it is its own place, shaped by its own rhythms—but what enters it is instantly recognisable: the language of profit, of opportunity, of promises with expiry dates. When Isha reaches for a future Nirmala never imagined, the play doesn’t cheer or scold—it watches.
The story unfolds across 100 minutes without an interval, carried entirely by four actors. There are no grand processions or special effects. The drama is anchored instead in voice, movement, and stillness. Critics have called it “absorbing” and “unflinching,” and those words hold up. Director Hannah Goodwin, co-directing with Shakthidharan, keeps the pace deliberate but charged, allowing silence and tension to speak louder than exposition.
Melbourne Theatre Company’s Artistic Director Anne-Louise Sarks describes the play as a “fiercely resonant story,” and while the phrase leans towards the promotional, there is something compelling in how The Wrong Gods manages to talk about capitalism, colonialism, and environmental degradation without slipping into slogans. Its power lies not in preaching but in witnessing. The audience is given a view into a world on the edge—no more, no less.
What’s refreshing is how much space the production allows for contradiction. Isha’s yearning is understandable. So is Nirmala’s fear. The stranger’s offer is seductive—and terrifying. These aren’t flat allegories or vessels for ideology; they are people, played with care and restraint by a cast that includes Manali Datar, Nadie Kammallaweera, Radhika Mudaliyar, and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash.
Keerthi Subramanyam’s set design is spare and precise, evoking the valley without spelling it out. Lighting by Amelia Lever-Davidson and a soundscape from Steve Francis and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya build an atmosphere that feels lived-in rather than composed. This is not a museum piece. It is a living dilemma.
The play arrives in Melbourne as part of RISING, the city’s major winter arts festival, and it fits snugly into a programme that often privileges the bold and the formally adventurous. Yet The Wrong Gods is not theatrical for its own sake. It trusts its audience to listen, to think, to reflect. In that sense, it’s closer to classical theatre than contemporary experimentation.
There’s something else the play does well—it resists exoticisation. Yes, it is set in a South Asian context. Yes, it grapples with intergenerational tension, belief, and migration. But the questions it raises—about the cost of survival, the limits of progress, and the fragility of tradition—could be asked anywhere. And in a city like Melbourne, where communities wrestle with these very issues daily, the timing is apt.
By avoiding caricature and embracing ambiguity, The Wrong Gods feels honest. It doesn’t pretend to know whether the old gods should be preserved or replaced. It simply invites you to sit in that valley for a while and watch what happens when everything familiar begins to shift.
Tickets are on sale now via mtc.com.au, with preview prices starting at $75. The production runs until 12 July. Whether you walk away moved, disturbed, or unsure, you won’t walk away unaffected.
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