Erin Harrington reviews Paradise, or the Impermanence of Ice Cream, written by Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis, directed by Lewis, presented by Indian Ink, at the Court Theatre, Thursday 19 September 2024.
It says a great deal about beloved theatre company Indian Ink that the packed opening night audience of Paradise, or the Impermanence of Ice Cream will trust them with a startling opening image. A middle-aged man (Jacob Rajan) lies sprawled across a flat, tilted platform, having been seemingly dropped there from a great height. His body is approached by a vulture (designed and operated by puppeteer Jon Coddington), looking for its next meal. But the man’s not dead, or alive. Instead, bumbling Kutisar finds himself stuck in purgatory, late (very late) for his shift at Harvey Norman, but with some past business to work out before he can recognise his mortality and perhaps find his way to paradise – if only the bloody vulture would leave him alone.
This striking opening frames a bittersweet story about ambition, friendship, and survival. Decades earlier, in Mumbai, young Kutisar is poor, charming and somewhat inept chaiwala from the country, who befriends Meera on a night out. She’s intelligent, anxious, and has dreams of being a scientist, but is stuck selling kulfi – Indian ice cream – at her late grandfather’s store. Both are trapped in their situation – Meera also bound by restrictive gendered expectations. As they look out across the vast sprawl of the city at night they see very different things: an opportunity to move up in the world, a cage.
Throughout, the nuanced script weaves in a story about the catastrophic near-extinction of vultures across India, Pakistan and Nepal in the 1990s and early 2000s. In addition to their vital role in the ecosystem, the birds are essential to the Parsi tradition of sky burial, in which the dead are laid out on tall, sacred towers to be stripped quickly by the scavengers, in time for the souls of the deceased to move on. The mystery of this ecological disaster underpins the characters’ personal upheavals, and challenges traditional ways with sudden, perhaps irreversible change. The play draws particularly from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, which acknowledges how much a fear of death drives us, while we also try to ignore our own mortality. I’m reminded of other existentialist work, too, especially in the play’s droll sense of humour and sense of the absurd.
Profound, yes, with big ideas about (after)life, and an acknowledgement of messiness and flesh – but the show is also warm and enormously funny. Rajan is an accomplished solo performer whose work draws from mask and clowning traditions. Wearing his trademark clownish mouth prosthetic, and what looks like brightly coloured disco pants, he switches deftly between the seven characters, including a scientist, a rich interfering aunty, a conservative Parsi leader, and an oily money-lender who has his eye on Kutisar. Justin Lewis’s direction, like Rajan’s style of performance, is economical, building a multidimensional, believable world in a tightly bounded area in the middle of the Court Theatre’s large stage.
The production is impeccably designed, from its precise and evocative lighting, to its detailed and occasionally comic soundscape and music. Coddington’s remarkable vulture puppet deservedly gets its own ovation at the end; I become particularly fascinated with the click-click of its taloned feet. I’m also entranced by the large, multi-panelled video screens that sit behind the playing space, particularly the use of projected images, designed by Bala Murali Shingade, made up of bright, gestural strokes of paint. These evoke the settings and the feel of the city, offsetting the occasionally grim subject material with bright pops of colour. It’s unexpected and delightful.
Indian Ink productions are reliably excellent, and I appreciate that the Court Theatre has taken the opportunity to host the play, which has already toured extensively. Paradise, or the Impermanence of Ice Cream is highly recommended – even for the squeamish.
The production has a limited run through until Saturday 28 September, 2024.
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