A poignant look at life – and the choices we do and don’t make to live it.
The Undying begins before you’ve found your seat. As you walk into the small black box theatre, incense burns and traditional south Asian instruments play, creating a treat for the senses and making you feel at home in the space. Photo frames hang across from the audience, baring text such as ‘Mira’s 1st birthday’, ‘Alton towers’, ‘Our wedding’. It sparks memory, nostalgia, familiarity, all of which, it becomes apparent are themes for the play.
We open on a married couple, in their 90s, who are deciding whether to take a revolutionary new medicine, which will grant them their youth, at the cost of their memories. A second chance at life. Their bodies will be 40 again, with all the memories up to that age and none past it. The wife, Amba, wants to take the pill. She wants to be young; to get the education she wasn’t able to her first time around, to live with the freedoms afforded to women now. The husband, Prav, isn’t so sure. A man of his era, stuck in his ways, unconvinced there’s anything worth experiencing a second time around.
The Undying is an exceptionally clever piece of theatre. Rea Dennhardt Patel’s script keeps the audience guessing, and it builds to an unexpected yet wholly satisfying conclusion. It deftly balances the comedic with the melancholic, the silly with the poignant. It makes you feel a pull to the women who came before, and wonder what choices our ancestors would have made, if they had choices. The play makes you question how much of ourselves we can change, the impact of our childhoods, how much time is enough time. Do we deserve second chance? What is the nature of love, and how can love change as we do? You leave this play with these questions whirring around your brain, and no doubt a tear shed for our two characters, Amba and Prav.
Vaishnavi Survaprakash, who plays Amba, and Akaash Dev Shemarboth, who plays Prav both brought incredible physicality to their roles. At every age their characters were, they used their bodies and expressions in such a way that I fully believed they were one minute 90, the next 40, and the next even younger, such is how they embodied their characters. The chemistry of the two actors elevated the script and created a captivating energy between them both. The small stage became a whole world, from their shining performances.
The Undying was a perfect piece of theatre. I’d certainly take a pill to go back and relive it again!
The Undying’s run is now concluded and ran at Soho Theatre, London.