How do you say goodbye when words were never there?
Arjun’s father never learnt to sign, and now that he’s gone, Arjun must find his own way to honour him. In a world where ancient traditions meet modern reality, Arjun embarks on a deeply personal and visually mesmerising quest to create a farewell ritual for his father – one woven from memory, love, and loss.
Travel from the UK to India in Last Rites, a stunning fusion of visual storytelling, electrifying movement, and an immersive soundscape you can feel as well as hear. This is theatre like you’ve never experienced it before, rich with emotion, beauty, and innovation.

Beautiful. Beautiful and mesmerising.

I’ve gone straight in, because this was the lingering takeaway I have from last night’s performance of Last Rites at the not quite tucked away lovely Quays theatre at Lowry, Salford.

This was a story of loss, frustration, regret, grief but most of all love.

Through his solo, non-verbal performance, theatre maker and Deaf artist Ramesh Meyyappan reached, I’m sure (for I can’t speak for everyone although it’s a fairly safe bet I can) each and everyone of us during that 65 minutes.

The death of a father is a theme which sadly has touched my life (let’s be clear, more ‘ripped through’, at the time) and will always form a permanent part of my own personal little bag of triggers I carry with me. And so I braced.

This performance, a co-production between artist Meyyapan and director, writer and performer, George Mann created in response to losing their own fathers, affected me.

So far so standard. But to be clear, there was nothing standard about this piece of artistic theatre,

It immersed you. The relationship between the choreography of Meyyapan’s physical movements and mime, the visual depictions projected on the screen be they words, animations, pulsating shapes and colours a-tune to the dancing rhythms of the Indian-infused soundtrack, the lighting which ebbs and flows and at times floods the senses, – it is all as one. No spotting the joins here.

As Arjun, Meyyapan, transforms before our eyes. He is his son, he is Arjun, and he his father as he plays out the synchronisation of two rituals. The physical as he washes the body of his passed father before the priest takes over for the cremation, and the emotional as he relives a life with a father who refuses to learn sign language to communicate with a son who is deaf. To paraphrase the anguished words of Arjun,

I couldn’t physically hear you but you refused to listen to me.

Taken on the journey through Arjun’s memories, the wonder of going to Temple for the first time, travels with his father, swimming into the ocean, anguish and frustration through the threat of arranged marriage, a continued refusal of his father to learn the tools to connect with his son, and a 10 year even more literal silence between the two as Arjun leaves for the UK, we feel the sadness and joy, and everything in between when that life’s replay of memories come crashing through unabated, when a loved one is lost and no more can be made.

This was a stunning piece of art that I would recommend you to go and see, hear, but most of all feel.

Ad Infinitum’s Last Rites is at Lowry theatre, Salford again tonigh, 19 February. Visit https://thelowry.com/whats-on/246//ad-infinitum-last-rites for more details and tickets.

Production images – Mihaela Bodlovic