Writer Ahilan Karunaharan explores his homeland's troubled past in A Mixtape for Maladies, which opens Auckland Theatre Company's 2025 season. Photo / Alex Burton
Writer Ahilan Karunaharan explores his homeland's troubled past in A Mixtape for Maladies, which opens Auckland Theatre Company's 2025 season. Photo / Alex Burton
A generation traumatised by Sri Lanka’s civil war has lived in silence. Writer Ahilan Karunaharan, whose family moved to New Zealand when he was 10, says it’s time to tell their stories.
The day Ahilan Karunaharan and his family landed back home in Sri Lanka, the 1983 “Black July” riotsbroke out.
Over the next seven days, thousands of Tamils were killed and the country’s 25-year civil war had begun.
Karunaharan doesn’t remember any of that. Born in the United Kingdom, he was only 3 at the time. Even when the family uprooted their lives again seven years later and moved to New Zealand, his parents never talked to him about the terrible things that happened.
“People have told me stories,” he says. “I know we were hidden by our friends and Sinhalese neighbours, who had to protect us.
“I remember when our school was raided. I remember travelling on the buses when the army would do checks all the time and my mum had to hide her jewellery under her dress so they wouldn’t take it from her.
“Whenever I tried to probe, my parents always steered the conversation elsewhere. But when we were all asleep or not there, I know their generation would sit and talk about their losses.”
Lud Manika's daughter, sister and mother were among some 100,000 people killed in Sri Lanka's protracted civil war, which was fought from 1983 to 2009. Photo / Getty Images
Karunaharan’s Sri Lankan’s roots have informed his work as an actor, writer, director and musician ever since he began creating theatre after graduating from Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School in 2007.
The Mourning After, a semi-autobiographical piece, follows a young man’s return to the remnants of his father’s village after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Yet, even today, the conversation we’re having about his latest work – the final chapter in this trilogy – is a difficult one.
So ingrained is the instinct to suppress, to shield, to avoid drawing unwelcome attention, that Karunaharan can feel the discomfort viscerally.
“People who left Sri Lanka hold on to the Sri Lanka they left and so there’s still a certain fear, a reservation and hesitation to talk about things,” he says. “You can probably see me right now, talking like this, my body does all these weird things.
“It was only 15 years ago that my uncle was getting death threats for talking about Sri Lankan issues on the news. It was only 15 years ago that I wasn’t allowed to go to certain events, because people who were spies for the government would be watching.
“It’s so recent, it’s so raw. But that time has to move on. We have moved on and we are moving in the right direction.”
Ahilan Karunaharan directs a rehearsal at Silo Theatre in 2019. Working from the floor, he says, helps give a different perspective. Photo / David St George
A Mixtape for Maladies opens Auckland Theatre Company’s 2025 season next week. Described as both a love letter to his homeland and a lament, it tells one family’s story through 17 songs that are performed live on stage – from Dusty Springfield and La Bamba to the hit single from a Tamil rom-com.
Moving from 1950s Sri Lanka to modern-day Aotearoa, it’s funny and warm and, inevitably, absolutely devastating.
The story is built around an old cassette tape Deepan (Shaan Kesha) finds that belongs to his mother Sangeetha, played by Gemma-Jayde Naidoo and, in her later years, by Ambika GKR.
Karunaharan’s use of a mixtape isn’t purely a theatrical device. His uncle, who settled in Germany, used to make compilation tapes for his parents.
Many other Tamils did the same, so displaced friends and relatives could keep in touch with the latest music. “But also it became a form of communication,” he says. “So you might get a mixtape full of songs of sorrow and pain and know there was something unsaid within that.”
A talented musician himself, Karunaharan will be one of three multi-instrumentalists performing live on stage. He also sings the opening song and has a minor role in the play.
Shaan Kesha plays Deepan, the New Zealand-born son of a Sri Lankan couple divided by civil war. Photo / Abhi Chinniah
Raised in the West and disconnected from his Sri Lankan history, Deepan is based on Karunaharan’s much younger brother, Janakan, who was born in New Zealand and works in IT.
“A lot of the sibling dynamics come from my mum’s stories,” he says. “I love that. The nation was in turmoil but that didn’t stop them from being teenagers. That was really important to capture, too.”
Over summer, Karunaharan returned to Sri Lanka for only the second time since he was a child, to do some research and field recordings for the play.
Director Jane Yonge, who worked with Karunaharan on a performed reading of A Mixtape for Maladies at the Auckland Arts Festival in 2023, says the emotional energy of the music adds a powerful layer to the script.
“This is such a deeply personal work for him and he’s just poured everything into it,” says Yonge, whose second child is due in July. She was pregnant with her first when she and Karunaharan last worked together on Nathan Joe’s Scenes from a Yellow Peril.
“It’s also really interesting and pertinent that we’re revisiting the show as the Treaty Principles Bill is occurring, and thinking about things that trigger divisiveness and how they can snowball quite rapidly.”
The cast of A Mixtape for Maladies includes writer Ahilan Karunaharan (sitting at right in the front row) as Rajan. Photo / Abhi Chinniah
Karunaharan, who’s currently living nomadically between Auckland and Wellington, still remembers the first mixtape he made – for a girl he had a crush on. The opening song was The Sign, a 1993 hit single by Swedish pop band Ace of Base. “That took me nowhere,” he sighs.
He’s interested in the idea of how memories shift over time, in the same way that the magnetic tape in a cassette slightly alters a song each time it’s played. Does music free people who have suffered from trauma – or does it hold them back?
“Are we stuck in the same playlist because we don’t have the ability to move forward, or is moving forward dangerous? The work doesn’t have answers, but it asks a lot of questions.”
A collaboration between Agaram Productions and the Auckland Theatre Company, A Mixtape for Maladies is on at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, March 4-23, as part of the Auckland Arts Festival, aaf.co.nz.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
