Mel Odedra and Mayen Metha are part of a new generation of NZ South Asian actors helping to make Tea a landmark production in our theatre history.
Seven stories in seven sips: this is what writer and director Ahi Karunaharan has brewed — a finely tuned, sensitive and enveloping story that shuttles us back in time to the tea plantations of Sri Lanka.
Set in the early 1920s, Tea focuses on an inter-generational family drama anchored in
the historic servitude of the Tamil indentured labourers, a captive population kept powerless by poverty, debt and fear. Mel Odedra and Mayen Mehta give unforgettable performances as Ravi and Bala, two brothers placed at opposite ends of the tea estate's socio-economic spectrum.
Their choices are a catalyst for events that widen the chasm between rich and poor and continue to steep each generation in growing precarity. Anjula Prakash plays Gowri, Ravi's daughter, a domestic to her cousins Theepa (Kalyani Nagarajan) and Raji (Rina Patel) — both of whom endure their mother Kamala's (Rashmi Pilapitiya) incessant nagging to get married.
However, in the next generation, Gowri's son Shiva (Odedra again) is determined to better his family's situation but tragedy strikes (a reminder of the 28 year civil war that enveloped Sri Lanka) and events begin to change only when his own daughter Janaki, played with finesse by Saraid Cameron, accepts Haron (Raji's grandson) as her husband.
Their union brings us to the bittersweet present where Shankari (again Cameron) and her now ageing father, played by the distinguished Mustaq Missouri, return home to Sri Lanka.
