Powerful Deaf-led theatre show about family and farewells heads to Newbury
The powerful Deaf-led theatre show Last Rites tours to Newbury’s Corn Exchange on Tuesday, February 4 and Wednesday 5. We sent our reviewer JON LEWIS to see the show in Oxford to give us the heads up.
Last Rites
at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford
from Wednesday, January 15 to Friday 17
Fathers and Sons
George Mann’s new Ad Infinitum production Last Rites, written with Glasgow-based Singaporean Deaf performer Ramesh Meyyappan, is a fictitious story based on losing a parent and having children that both artists have experienced. It’s a solo show but Christopher Harrisson’s often amusingly drawn animations and Akintayo Akinbode’s multilayered soundtrack work as additional cast members.
The play explores the nature of the relationship between fathers and sons through the middle-aged Arjun’s experience in returning to his birth country, India, for his father’s funeral. The vision of his father’s corpse lying on a mat prior to cremation and the finding of his father’s glasses, stimulates a period of reflection and introspection which structures the drama. The glasses are a metaphor for seeing, and not seeing, with Arjun’s deafness a blind spot in his father’s life that causes lifelong misunderstandings and resentments.
Arjun uses sign language to the audience that is magnified into gestural physical theatre movements that are choreographed in harmony with the projected animations and music. Words themselves meld into pictograms swirling across the screen, performative interactions that illustrate Arjun’s thoughts. Often, words within sentences linger, suggesting the theme for the various sections of the story.
Arjun is an outsider in India, rejecting the Hinduism that is so central to his father’s life. This isolation from his family’s traditions is partly a result of his deafness but also a consequence of his inquisitorial nature. We see the little boy asking big questions about Hinduism that remain unanswered. The influential sounds of temple bells, tabla drums and sitars seep into the scene, the musicians imitated by Meyyappan in a speedily inventive sequence. The soundtrack suggests that Arjun does connect powerfully with the culture of his homeland.
As the bridge between his father and his son, some kind of reconciliation emerges when Arjun notices how similar grandfather and grandson are. The life journey that the audience follows throughout this beautifully conceived production is both touching and intriguing. The music that pounds from stage to audience’s feet creates an immersive atmosphere that magically envelops the theatre.
Ad Infinitum have, yet again, created an entrancing, thought-provoking drama.
