We sit down with Performer & Co-writer of Paradise or the Impermanence of Ice Cream Jacob Rajan to get some behind the scenes thoughts on the show.

---

What inspired you to tell this story?
We were initially inspired by a trip to Mumbai where we stumbled on the amazing death ritual of the Parsi community there. The role of vultures in the Parsi’s death practice and the subsequent discovery of the mystery of India’s vanishing vultures got us hooked.

As a Playwright what are your main intentions for Paradise?
It’s a love letter to Mumbai, it’s a love letter to vultures and it’s a meditation on what we do with the time we have left.

 

How did you discover The Denial of Death? And why did you choose that story?
I guess when you follow vultures they lead you to death. Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is more a textbook than a story. We found Becker’s ideas to be incredibly revealing. The way human behaviour is shaped by our uneasy relationship with death. It’s a great way to think about characters’ motivations and flaws.

How is the Paradise different from your other characters?
Paradise is actually a sequel of sorts. Kutisar is the main character from an earlier play of ours, Guru of Chai. We loved him so much we brought him into this story at very different time in his life. The difference in this play is that our storyteller is no longer in control of the story he is telling.

How did you create this role?
The original Kutisar in Guru of Chai was based on a real life character, Nyoman Sukerta , a masked dancer from Bali. A lovely flawed human being who literally danced into our lives. Having created our fictional hero, Kutisar, we dreamed into what he might be up to 20 years on and the result was Paradise.

What inspires you for your performance as Kutisar?
Kutisar is based on a real life person. Neoman Surkurta who introduced us to Balinese mask dance in Bali. He was a mask dancer himself, immersed in this devotional and sacred form yet very much a beautifully flawed human being. Loved to drink, gamble and go fishing at any opportunity. Sadly he died a few years after we met him but Kutisar is very much inspired by our time with Neoman.

How do you create a relationship on stage between multiple characters?
There’s an element of procession that happens when you land the character. In a way, the character inhabits you and you look at the world through their eyes. If you can balance that with the craft of knowing where you are on stage then the relationship between characters happens just as it would if there were other performers there with you. You’re reacting to what they do and say.

What excites you about this performance?
I love how the audience is seduced into the imaginative world of this play. The stage is very bare and there’s really nothing in the way of props yet ,by the end, they will have been taken to multiple locations in Mumbai as well as being suspended between life and death. And, of course, they will fall in love with a vulture.

Do you come up with characters then the storyline, or is it the other way round?
Well, it sounds like a cop out, but they are totally interlinked. You can’t have character without having plots. Because what is the plot but the character coming up against a situation where they are tested? I think it’s dangerous to just write a story and then throw characters into it. I think that the story design is such that the character is put into extremes so that they make choices. And those choices are what we’re interested in, ‘why did they go that way?’. And that’s to do with their character. To create something that I think is satisfying, you need to see that change. And for that change to happen, you need to have a plot that facilitates that change, and I think that’s what we enjoy.