Deaf-led play a rare treat for theatregoers with hearing loss

Review: Last Rites

at the Corn Exchange

on Tuesday, February 4

Review by JULIET ENGLAND

IT’S hard to describe the feeling of sitting in the dark, in that moment of anticipation before a show, when you have a severe hearing loss (I have a cochlear implant), knowing that you won’t miss a word, or that the audience won’t laugh while you feel left out. A rare delight indeed.

Last Rites has no verbal utterances. Instead, throughout 80 uninterrupted, fully accessible minutes, there are myriad movements, facial expressions, music, lighting, sign language and captions (of which more later), to tell the story in multiple unspoken ways.

The single actor (Ramesh Meyyappan) and barely-there set – a low platform, a few bowls and a mattress – contribute to the stripped-back feel.

Deaf actor Meyyappan plays a deaf man who, as the eldest male descendant, returns to India following his dad’s death to give him the titular last rites according to Hindu traditions, including washing the body and preparing it for cremation.

The relationship between father and son has clearly been a complicated one. In his youth, the latter rejected both an arranged marriage and the Hindu religion, eventually leaving India for the UK.

Only having become aware of sign language aged eight, the younger character is also, understandably, enraged at his dad’s refusal to learn or communicate with him in it.

Meyyappan’s physicality is genuinely astounding – by turns angry, loving, playful, poignant and funny, he flips through the story and characters with incredible fluidity, chameleon-like, paying intense attention to each muscle movement while making the whole thing look effortless and maximising use of the whole stage, his body a blank canvas on to which the story can be painted. When he wrings out the cloth to wash his father, having rinsed his own hands, you almost feel the water yourself. If some of the sequences occasionally felt slightly long, that’s a minor quibble.

There’s a screen on to which images and some captions are projected, providing a mesmerising backdrop. Even the captions are inventive, shifting shape or falling away.

In the interesting Q&A afterwards, we were told of the importance of this creative captioning as a key part of the whole piece – boring subtitles they’re certainly not.

Meyyappan also spoke movingly of the Hindu burial rite of submerging underwater with the ashes of the dead at sunrise.

Last Rites is a dazzling, inventive and unconventional exploration of multiple aspects of identity and the father-son relationship, among other things.

I was only sorry to see so many empty seats in the Corn Exchange, even on a cold, dark Tuesday night.