We sit down with Director and Co-writer of Paradise or the Impermanence of Ice Cream Justin Lewis to get some behind the scenes thoughts on the show.

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What are your main intentions and ideas for Paradise?
One of the key dramatic ideas for Paradise was that our hero is trapped in limbo with nothing but a vulture. The loneliness and terror of this is captured theatrically by restricting the performer to a tiny playing space that they can’t leave and keeping the fourth wall up so there is no direct address to the audience. The audience become intimate observers of the hero’s fate – drawn into the drama.

What do you want the audience to think, feel and understand?
More than anything I want the audience to love and appreciate vultures. Before embarking on this show I had a very western view of them as loathsome creatures to be feared. But what I discovered was how incredible they are and what a great service they do humanity by cleaning up the environment. They are beautiful despite their initial appearances. It’s a terrible tragedy how humans have all but wiped them out but there is hope, we can learn and change. This piece is a mystery – a mystery of what happened to the vultures but also a mystery about how to let and go and move on, about how living with the reality of our mortality can set us free. And like life it is also funny, absurd and magical.

What excites you about this production?
Jacob Rajan does the thing he does better than anyone else which to embody a number of different characters fully and effortlessly. And I love working with puppetry – the vulture puppet Jon Coddington has made and operates is glorious. The set is simple but the hand-painted backdrops which are projected onto screens are works of art in themselves. I find them imaginative and evocative and give a human feel to the high-tech projection. The sound design is very sophisticated and becomes like another performer. People will talk of Paradise as a solo show but it’s really not – the puppeteer, sound operator, lighting and video operator are as intrinsic to the performance as Jacob.

What are the challenges of having an actor play multiple characters?
You need an actor who has the facility to really change their voices and body and create a physical change for the different characters. This requires time in the rehearsal process to allow them to explore, make mistakes and build up the shape of the various characters. Also, when constructing the play, time needs to be allowed for the actor to make costume changes.

What inspired you to tell this story?
A number of different ingredients combined to inspire this work. We read the Denial of Death and we spent time in Mumbai where we learned of the Parsi sky burials (where bodies are laid out for vultures to pick clean) and the mystery of the vanishing vultures. We also visited a kulfi ice- cream shop that served as a model for the one in this play. We also came across the ancient tale of Gilgamesh – perhaps the first story of a journey to the underworld and a buddy love story. We wanted to make a story that was about a friendship between a man and a woman. Finally, we wanted to make another story with the character Kutisar who first appeared in Guru of Chai. That’s a lot of different ingredients but they all coalesce around the vultures – what they represent and the mystery of what happened to them.

How did you discover The Denial of Death? And why did you choose that story?

I was referred to Denial of Death by my Aikido teacher (Aikido is a Japanese martial art that I have been training in for almost 30 years). My wife is a funeral director, so death is part of my day to day reality. I love the idea that accepting my own mortality can be free me to live a richer, happier life.

When writing, what is the relationship like between you and Jake?

We talk a lot. We will spend hours and hours, and days and days talking. It’s one of the great things, because writing is often a lonely process, so having someone to collaborate with is good. We’re both theatre-makers because we like to collaborate. And we each have our own strengths, Jake’s really good on dialogue and character, and my strength is on the architecture, on the more structural sort of stuff. So, we kind of have complementary skills. What also works is that we know how to talk to one another about the work and we can disagree about what the right thing is. And in those discussions about the work we talk about what is right for the story and what’s right for the character, rather than arguments about who’s right or wrong.