By: Terry MacTavish

‘Mischief’, actor Jacob Rajan has said, and I can well believe it, is his favourite word. Mischief – ‘playful subversion’ – is such a perfect

description of what theatre can aspire to, charming us while shaking us out of our complacency, our wilful ignorance. And how immaculately Rajan, the superb sole actor in Paradise or The Impermanence of Ice Cream, and Indian Ink co-director Justin Lewis have put this into practice, in show after memorable show.

For Paradise this brilliant duo has seized on that most daunting of themes, our acceptance or denial of death itself, to create a mind-bending work that focuses on the period immediately after the death of Indian immigrant Kutisar, the transition time before his purification by actual vultures, his body pecked clean to enable his spirit to enter Paradise, according to Parsi belief.

Kutisar’s vulture waits, ominously, while over three days he relives the most significant time of his life, the crazy 1980s in the scintillating city of Bombay/Mumbai. This I assume is to allow Kutisar to reflect on the choices he has made, and how he has spent the precious time allotted to him. Kutisar, 30 years ago a ‘country bumpkin’, arrives wide-eyed in Mumbai where he is befriended by Meera. She is a young Parsi woman who, although longing to be a scientist, has been appointed by her recently deceased grandfather to run his kulfi ice cream shop. To allow her ancestor to attain paradise, Meera must discover why the vultures that should purify him are disappearing.

A true quest, therefore, to be shared with Kutisar, and involve various other characters, including a wonderfully mad aunt who considers she is helping by illegally keeping a caged vulture for breeding purposes. All seven characters are swiftly and efficiently delineated by Rajan, who has an absolute genius for quick changes – a stroke of long luscious hair for Meera, bandy legs and arthritic hands for her aunt, and amazingly, the ability to grow a foot in height to play a suave, sinister bully.

Rajan is wonderfully matched onstage by a puppeteer of rare quality, Jon Coddington, who designed, constructed and operates the stunning feathered vulture that hovers around Kutisar, occasionally attacking him, comedic but menacing, waiting, waiting…. Our revulsion, however, is subtly subverted, altered to reluctant appreciation of the beneficial attributes of these great birds, cleansing the white bones of putrid flesh.

Indian Ink is renowned as a modern mask company, but in this instance Rajan does not change masks, using only false teeth, relying on his body to create his characters. In the past I have loved Rajan’s clever mask work, but this also suits me fine, and indeed I think we could lose the teeth, which make audibility tricky at the back of the huge Regent theatre. Costume is mask too, after all, and this one is delicious, designed by Elizabeth Whiting with 80s flair, Kutisar glowing like a priceless ruby in red velvet jacket and gleaming baggy pants.

Altogether the production values are outstanding, though the technical support (from slick operators Adam Ogle and Sam Mence) is hardly needed, so skilful are Rajan and Coddington. Mood music and hyper-real sound effects (David Ward) that rock the theatre, dramatic lighting design (D Andrew Potvin) and spectacular projected imagery (John Verryt, Bala Murali Shingade) make for an overwhelming experience, from a thumping, flashing Mumbai nightclub where Kutisar meets Meera, to a wild fire crackling and smoking around Rajan as he pulls off a furious rooftop argument between four characters. Phew.

Kutisar is in many ways a comical character, Rajan drawing laughter with just a deadpan line – ‘That was a mistake’, ‘I am talking to a vulture!’, ‘Who knew vomiting was a defence mechanism?’ and his disco dancing is hilarious – yet rather than feeling much sympathy for him, I am drawn to the persona of Meera, a courageous girl denied education, betrayed over and again, not least by Kutisar, and find myself wanting to know more of her story. Indeed, all the lesser characters are intriguing, an added richness in the text.

Paradise was begun in 2019 after a visit to Mumbai that entranced the writers, and led them to learn of the actual fate of the Parsi’s sacred vultures, dying from some mysterious pandemic, but as the programme notes, the play was radically altered by the emergence of earth’s more disruptive pandemic. Even the intended focus turned from Immortality to Impermanence ‘our lives are but melting ice-cream’. (Resonates with me – during my own thrilling stay in the spicy heat of Mumbai I lived on iced chocolate milk, which is surely just melted ice cream?) The stress of Covid lock-down, along with the influence of Ernest Becker’s book, Denial of Death, perhaps accounts for an underlying bleakness, a little more existential angst than I associate with Indian Ink.

Although I adore our beautiful Regent Theatre and although, in a considerable compliment to the company, the downstairs is almost full, I feel a smaller space would suit the production better, allowing Rajan to create a greater intimacy with his audience. The publicity photos of Rajan humorously interacting with a quirky vulture puppet may have been misleading – certainly for some surprisingly youthful patrons, perhaps bewildered by a fast-paced storyline and poignant, even gruesome themes, the true highlight was the vulture breaking out in booty-shaking disco-dancing.

Jacob Rajan is not just loved, but revered, a national treasure with an exemplary acting technique, and Indian Ink has truly made its mark on our theatre scene. The grimly philosophical theme of Paradise, delivered as it is through gorgeous puppetry and Rajan’s brilliantly witty clowning, will have affected people very differently. I am always deeply interested in the way every patron brings their own experience and immediate state of mind to each theatrical performance.

I have myself come straight from the deathbed of an old friend and mentor, one of the great influences on my life, so the dark theme is both relevant and distressing. Trust Indian Ink to probe even the most painful parts of our minds. Yet it may well be, as co-creator Justin Lewis suggests, that by contemplating our mortality we can appreciate life more fully, even find beauty in what we fear.

And most surely it is a privilege to gain insight into diverse cultures such as that of the Parsi community. As Hilary Halba and David O’Donnell write in their excellent recently published Acting in Aotearoa, ‘The art of acting has become a potent means of embodying and expressing diversity and identity in a post-colonial context’. (1) In a world that seems bent on division, who better placed than Indian Ink Theatre to celebrate cultural diversity? With over 100 people staying for a Q&A after the show, it seems clear that Ōtepoti Dunedin is eager for the unique ‘playful subversion’ that is Paradise or the Impermanence of Ice Cream.