The three-and-a-half hour play is based on the playwright's family story, and follows four generations from 1956 to 2004, from Sri Lanka to Australia.
[9] The first lines of the play are spoken in Tamil and Sinhala, and translated into English by actors not participating in the action in that scene.
[9] The cast in Sydney and Adelaide included Vaishnavi Suryaprakash and Kalieaswari Srinivasan (both as Radha); Jay Emmanuel and Antonythasan Jesuthasan (as Thirru); Shiv Palekar (as Sid/Siddhartha); Rarriwuy Hick (Lily).
[11][12] Other cast members were Prakash Belawadi, Arky Michael, Nicholas Brown, Ahi Karunaharan, Monica Kumar, Gandhi MacIntyre, Monroe Reimers, Nipuni Sharada, Rajan Velu, and Sukania Venugopal.
[10][8] Shakthidharan's script was originally titled A Counting and Cracking of Heads, and was the joint winner of the 2015 NSW Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights.
[23] In April 2020 Counting and Cracking won the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.
His 2023 play The Jungle and the Sea, also co-written and directed with Eamon Flack, was produced by Belvoir to good reviews and won several awards.
[25][26] Screen work includes the feature film Riz (2015), which he co-wrote, directed, and produced, with Guido Gonzalez.
Blair was a key figure in the establishment of Aboriginal-run social housing development The Block in Redfern, Sydney.