An immigrant tale of astronomical proportions

Immigrant stories are invigorating the theatres of New Zealand, says Jacob Rajan.

“The language of astrophysics is full of the language of fairy tale: Black Holes, White Dwarves and Red Giants,” says Jacob Rajan, a microbiologist turned writer and actor. Science, fantasy and the immigrant experience all come together in his latest play, The Candlestickmaker, which will show at CentreStage, a premier season of international performance presented by the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Produced under the banner of the New Zealand-based theatre company Indian Ink, the play follows a 19-year-old New Zealand Indian student off to discover his home land armed with the customary tourist guide, the Lonely Planet.

“Sunil is visiting India for the first time and arrives at his, once grand, ancestral home,” says Rajan. “He is clumsy, impressionable, prone to distraction and eager to please—a combination of traits that get him into a lot of trouble.”

Rajan’s adventures are all safely outside the prescribed itineraries of Lonely Planet—in fact they lead him to discover the mysteries of the universe. He is guided, instead, by his gloriously eccentric uncle Rohan, a rude and superstitious 300-hundred-year-old cook, a duck, and Nobel Laureate and the greatest mathematical astrophysicist of his generation, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar.

The play is indeed a tribute to Chandrasekhar—and the circumstances in which Rajan chanced upon his story is as much a happy coincidence as Sunil’s journey. “I was staying at my grandmother’s house in Kerala and for some reason she had a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. There was a small paragraph about Chandrasekhar and it intrigued me that I had never heard of him,” says Rajan.

“I was a science student before I got into acting. I’d heard of Openhiemer, Einstein, Rutherford - but not my own countryman. I did some more research when I got back to New Zealand and was struck by the man’s achievements and humility. I wanted to pay tribute to that and reflect on the nature of happiness.”

Among other interesting facts, Rajan learned during his research that Chandrasekhar was nicknamed ‘The Candlestickmaker’ by colleagues in America who couldn’t pronounce his name. “It struck me as a great title for a play. It has the sound of a fairy tale. It seemed like rich material to draw upon—how the forces that act upon stars and planets mirror the forces that act upon our lives.”

Interestingly, Rajan plays all the characters in this play with the aid of masks. He used masks in the company’s previous play Krishnan’s Dairy, which also showed at CentreStage in 2007.

“I played five characters using quick change masks that enabled me as a solo performer to create the illusion of dialogue on stage,” says Rajan about Krishnan’s Dairy, which is currently being adapted into a full length feature film.

While many actors would be at a loss confined in a mask, robbed of their main acting arsenal, the facial expression, Rajan revels in its theatricality. “It is precisely because the facial expressions are taken away that the character is liberated,” he says.

“Many actors, because of their reliance on facial expressions become talking heads on stage. With mask, the voice, the body and, of course, the eyes become the chief means of expression and that is so suited to theatre in engaging a live audience. Everything is slightly larger than life. The mask is an amplification of the face and, as a result, everything becomes amplified – the emotions, the soul and the truth. Humour is funnier and tragedy more profound – that is the allure.”

Though this use of masks to amplify emotion, may allude itself to the Indian mask traditions and the Rasa theories of Indian performance in some way, the masks that Indian Ink use are based in an Italian form. “Justin Lewis, my director, and I both trained in this form in Italy early on in our work together,” says Rajan.

In fact, it was the common love of masks that brought them together to co-found Indian Ink after they met quite by chance in 1996 while working on another show. “The name captures the spirit of our early shows which were strongly influenced by my viewpoint as an Indian New Zealander,” says Rajan.

He was born in Malaysia but both his parents are from Kerala. They immigrated to New Zealand in the 70s.

So I ask if there are any biographical elements in the 19-year old protagonist’s search for his roots in The Candlestickmaker. “I’d like to think that I was a little bit more sophisticated than Sunil, the central character of the play, but I must admit the clumsiness with which he deals with his culture and his adherence to The Lonely Planet guide book bore more than a passing resemblance to my own encounters back home.”

Indian Ink has already won two Fringe First Awards at the Edinburgh Festival as well as three production of the year awards in New Zealand and Rajan believes that it is the vibrancy of multicultural experiences and stories that is driving theatre in New Zealand today.

“In New Zealand we are bereft of ancient theatre traditions but, at the same time, we’re not shackled by them,” he says. “We pirate whatever we find useful or interesting. At its worst it is a bloodless imitation. At its best it is fresh and invigorating. We are a young nation of natives and immigrants and those voices are emerging in our theatres.”