By Renee Liang

Indian Ink celebrates its 29th birthday next year, and fittingly will be touring its newest work, Balloon Dog, to Whangarei, Hamilton, Tauranga, Auckland, Sydney and Wollongong. Before that, there’s a blink and you’ll miss it ‘preview season’ at TAPAC: just one week of performances. Balloon Dog is a jewel of a play, a worthy addition to Indian Ink’s repertoire and brimming with its signature humanity and gentle comedy while not flinching from serious themes.

Writers Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis have adapted a short story that is very famous (to those not stuck in Anglophile literature), written in 1892 by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Kabuliwala, a subtle exploration of class assumptions and unlikely friendships, has been reimagined in modern-day Auckland. The transition is a success: in our current globalised world and this city of migrants, the story has as much weight as 130 years ago.

Indian Ink Theatre Company is a case study of the creative focus and agility that results from having the same team of creatives working on productions year after year. Along with Rajan (who also acts) and Lewis (who directs), Murray Edmond is back as dramaturge, John Verryt designs set, Elizabeth Whiting designs costume, David Ward plays live music and sound effects, Jon Coddington designs puppets, and Sam Mence designs and operates lighting. For at least the past decade Indian Ink has also dedicated itself to growing the next generation of practitioners, so in Balloon Dog Rajan is joined on stage by recent Toi Whakaari graduate Alisha Jacob and the more established Jehangir Homavazir. Talia Pua assists with set design and Te Huamanuka Luiten-Apirana assistant directs. (Pua and Luiten-Apirana are both alumni of Indian Ink’s separate “Next Generation” capability-building programme).

Back to the play, though. Rajan plays Ravi, a perfectly nice Indian New Zealander with the clipped vowels of a middle-class NZ upbringing (and possibly a private school). Ravi, after an illustrious career as an architect, has retried to indulge himself as a painter, but his plans for peace are derailed by his adult daughter Sara who asks him for childcare while she establishes a new business. Jacob plays the very relatable Sara, a solo mum negotiating work and parenthood with frequent attacks of guilt, knowing that despite loving her, Ravi disapproves of her life choices. Homavazir plays Kabir, a Gujarati farmer who is being exploited as a migrant worker in NZ.

With Balloon Dog’s tagline, ‘would you open your door to a stranger?’ the hook is baited: Kabir, played with wide eyed naivety by Homavazir, walks by Ravi’s front door on the way to his night shift at a service station, and is spotted by Ravi’s granddaughter, five-year-old Mini. Kabir, despite his rough appearance, has a magical way of understanding children: soon he and Mini engage every afternoon, with jokes, new words in Gujarati and shared food. Ravi feels the relationship is ‘harmless’ and besides, not having his ear talked off by Mini allows him to focus on painting; it’s only when Sara lambasts him for trusting strangers with her daughter that the adult walls start rising.

Although ‘outsider crashes flawed middle class family’ is a familiar setup, Balloon Dog offers several unique takes. Firstly, the ‘nice family’ and the intruder are the same ethnicity. Of course, Indians can be racist towards other Indians. There is some thought-provoking ground-shifting, for example with Ravi admitting he can’t speak any Indian languages, and also forgetting his guest is vegetarian. This shame of not knowing ‘our’ culture and ‘our’ languages is familiar to many ‘descendants of migrants’ including myself. There’s a running gag around Kabir automatically taking off his shoes when he enters the house, even when the westernised Ravi tries to tell him it’s not necessary.

As with Tagore’s original story, Balloon Dog also explores the divides of class and privilege, and the misunderstandings and assumptions that colour every interaction, no matter how well meaning. Kabir may radiate a childlike innocence, but he is not innocent to how the world perceives him, nor slow to understand the subtext of ‘polite’ refusal. His upbringing, however, means he navigates the suspicions and slurs with grace; here, it’s the Western ways of relating that seem coarse.

At its heart though, Balloon Dog is an exploration of parenting – especially parenting when absent. Who among us doesn’t relate to this topic in some way? Even if we’re not parents, we have still been parented, and I am sure we all have opinions about that.

There are many absent parents in Balloon Dog. Ravi is left to raise Sara alone when his wife dies when she is eight; he does his best, based on what he thinks she would have done. Ravi is preoccupied when artistic ‘flow’ hits; in these moments, the voluble Mini is fobbed off, in the most kindly way. Sara has to choose between trying to make a new life for herself and having to trust Ravi (whose judgement she doesn’t rate highly) with Mini. Sara is also trying to get Mini’s deadbeat dad to at least communicate with the daughter he’s barely met. And then there’s Kabir, who never volunteers, because no one asks him, that he’s drawn towards Mini because his own daughter is the same age. His realisation that she might have forgotten him is one of the heartrending moments.

All three actors display innate craft: micropauses and tiny facial changes have the audience laughing in recognition while also wondering how many times we’ve done the same during the dance of social relationships. The famous Indian Ink prosthetic teeth are back, a form of mask that reminds us that the characters portrayed are tropes to some extent, exaggerated representations of humanity. And yet, the accurately observed writing has us instantly recognising ourselves in these characters, in their fears and doubts.

Mini, the 5-year-old at the centre of the story, is not played by any one actor. She comes to vivid life through storytelling, choreography and shadow play. The non-judgemental friendship between Mini and Kabir is a counter to the fearful social maneuvering of the adults around them. The balloon dog that Kabir offers Mini – endearingly comedic yet in danger of instant destruction – is emblematic of the ethereal nature of childhood relationships.

The deceptively simple set by Verryt and Pua has been built for touring. Banner backdrops with geometric designs – evoking houses, walls, part of a garden – hang so the actors can move between them; draped boxes and risers evoke a house, a bed, outside steps. The set reminded me of the show Playschool, with large friendly patterns and draped forms; the actors’ dancing also reminded me of this genre.

The lighting design by Sam Mence is subtle, moving us from day to night or onwards in time; several unusually placed lamps are unveiled as fun surprises when we get to the shadow play, with creative use being made of backdrops, side theatre walls and torches.

David Ward’s sound desk sits off to the side, outside the world: but he can see the actors, and they sometimes acknowledge him; he intrudes on the action with live sound effects such as a bouncing ball.

Whiting’s costumes echo the classic divides. The nice Kiwi Indian family are dressed in cream, with Ravi’s pristine painterly vest (with handy pockets for brushes) being a particular nod to middle class cosplay. Sara, despite claiming that her business is struggling to survive, wears designer jackets. Kabir in contrast wears the kind of cheap windbreaker you’d find in a $2 shop; later, he dons a checked suit that those of us who have immigrant parents would recognise as the ‘best’ clothes we wear when trying to make an impression in a Western society. I loved the subtle touch of Kabir’s ‘teeth’ being misaligned, a mark of poverty (I had to google to verify that the actor’s real teeth are, in fact, perfectly straight).

Although Balloon Dog starts off as a comedy of manners, soon enough darker shadows – the fears and quick judgements of adults, the ways advantages are gained and lies are layered – start to intrude. Here, the storytelling style favoured by Indian Ink draws us in, asking us to respond, sometimes verbally, sometimes just as witnesses. The fourth wall is a curtain that is frequently twitched. As the misunderstandings layer on top of each other, we are involved without meaning to. We too are neighbours, watching, complicit. When something utterly terrible happens, we feel frozen, wondering what we would do in the same situation.

There’s a lot of seeing and not seeing in Balloon Dog. Something bad is happening to Kabir, but Ravi and Sara are too caught up in their own issues to recognise it, and Kabir is too polite to mention it – or rather, he knows that this will just create further suspicion. In a globalised world where exploitation and suffering is blatant, how can we still claim it’s invisible to us? I feel like I’ve stepped outside the boundaries of a theatre review now. But in a time of history when things are very, very bad, perhaps theatre is one of the ways that will help us to think out our responses to the real thing.

Like Tagore’s original story, and as with life, there are no tidy endings in Balloon Dog. Justice isn’t truly served; Mini and Kabir’s friendship remains fractured by the adult world. Time too moves on; children grow into young adults, their relationships and priorities change.

The final, beautiful image of the play – a child reaching for a balloon dog drifting out of reach – has remained with me for days after. It made me remember that we all still contain the child that we once were, we are all still capable of seeing each other simply as friends and fellow humans. Perhaps that’s one thing to do in this era of bad news. If our moment together is just sharing the joy of having a balloon dog, perhaps that’s enough.