Of vultures and Bollywood
Acclaimed actor Jacob Rajan is heading on tour for a new show that weaves together Bollywood disco and the real-life mystery of India’s vanishing vultures.
Paradise or the Impermanence of Ice Cream will debut in Wellington later this month before the show heads across Aotearoa.
True to the style of Rajan’s theatre company Indian Ink, which produced the show, the play is rife with puppetry, inspired sound design, comic originality and mischief. It came about after Rajan and Indian Ink co-founder Justin Lewis went on a trip to Mumbai in 2019.
‘‘[We] got inspired by the city, its people and its secrets. In particular, the mystery of India’s vanishing vultures – the fastest mass
extinction of all time – and we’d never heard about it,’’ Rajan said.
‘‘It pricked our curiosity and the more we delved into it, the more wonderfully strange it got. We originally started writing about Mumbai, vultures, and immortality, but discovered we were actually writing about impermanence.
‘‘It’s a word that resonates with the strange times we’re living in.’’
The play itself follows a man desperately trying to avoid death being flung between limbo and his past, where a rebellious young woman from Mumbai’s Parsi community holds the key that may deliver him to paradise.
Rajan delivers a solo performance of seven characters in the play, which sold out a two-week preview season last year, while Lewis is director.
It’s set to run in 11 centres, with Rajan saying it will be Indian Ink’s most-ambitious national tour, with shows also in Ka¯ piti, Upper Hutt, Christchurch, Auckland, Tauranga, Nelson, Dunedin and O¯ amaru. It precedes a North America tour scheduled for 2022.