Trilogy portrays experience of being an Indian in NZ

The Pickle King is a love story based in a rundown hotel.

It started with a chance meeting across the bar at the late - but still lamented - Watershed Theatre. Nearly 10 years later, Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis are still having that chinwag, but it's been far from idle conversation.

Out of their discussion came Indian Ink, the theatre company responsible for three of New Zealand's most successful plays: Krishnan's Dairy (1997), The Candlestickmaker (2000) and The Pickle King (2002).

They have had glowing reviews, won awards, toured internationally and earned their creators enough to feed their families without having to deliver pizza or stack supermarket shelves on the side.

Now, for the first time, the trilogy will be performed consecutively - each play for two nights - in Auckland and Wellington. The reason? Audience demand, says Lewis, the producer, director and co-writer.

He explains Indian Ink's success, saying, "There are lots of ways to cook chicken. You can roast it or you can make chicken madras. It still tastes good and it's still the same basic thing. We tell good human stories and people are just people no matter where they come from.

"A lot of theatre companies in New Zealand produce work - great work - for a show to be put on for a total of six weeks if you're lucky. We are about making work and keeping it alive for a long period of time. Luckily, audiences have embraced what we have done."

The plays were inspired by the experiences of being Indian in New Zealand, and introduce a world - part fantasy, part reality - whose characters are different from those usually seen in the mainstream but share the same dreams, fears and longings.

Rajan, the performer and co-writer, can portray the multifarious characters with masks that he says embrace the "theatricality of theatre".

"How do you compete with television, with film or with DVDs and computer games?" he asks. "The temptation has been to make things naturalistic, but what struck us is that the point of the theatre is that it can be larger than life. It can be a fantasy world."

Krishnan's Dairy, the first instalment, was a class exercise Rajan did while a drama school student. He took the cliche that all dairies in New Zealand are run by Indians, threw in a love story and created a 20-minute piece using masks to portray different characters.

As a young Indian actor, he figured work would be more limited than for many of his classmates: "It's not something I'm particularly militant about. It's just a fact of life."

After meeting Lewis in 1996, they decided to develop Rajan's piece. The challenge was fitting in their new project with other work commitments. They worked for short, intense bursts and found things would later coalesce, allowing them to take the next step.

The curtain went up on Krishnan's Dairy 18 months later at Bats Theatre in Wellington. The reviews were glowing and ticket sales went berserk.

Lewis and Rajan took the show on the road. Everywhere, there were rave reviews and sold-out shows. In 1997, Krishnan's Dairy was Production of the Year at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards.

They shouted themselves a trip to Italy the following year to spend three months at an international school for masks in theatre, and in 1999 participated in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and got a Fringe First Award.

Then the NZ Festival of the Arts commissioned them to write a second play. They had to escape the shadow of Krishnan's Dairy but create something with similar appeal.

The writing process was totally different. There were deadlines and expectations. Unfinished, with three months to go until a sold-out opening night, Rajan and Lewis workshopped the piece to a non-industry audience in Hamilton.

"It was just marvellous because the audience asked us really simple, basic questions which made us think," Lewis says. "We realised we had to tell this story in its own way."

The Candlestickmaker was their second success and spurred Rajan and Lewis to complete a trilogy.

For The Pickle King, a love story set in a rundown hotel, Rajan drew on the more humorous aspects of a night-porter job he had done to pay his way through university.

They kept the masks but expanded the cast.

Repeating the success of Krishnan's Dairy, The Pickle King won the Chapman Tripp Production of the Year 2002 and another Fringe First Award at Edinburgh the following year.

Lewis and Rajan no longer tour the plays - they have six children between them so don't want to stay on the road for months at a stretch, saying it is not fair on their families and they would miss their kids too much.

They never tire of their trilogy, saying it is constantly evolving. Dialogue is tweaked or updated; the staging alters slightly.

And the audiences, a much more diverse bunch than often seen at the theatre, still come.

* Indian Ink Trilogy - Krishnan's Dairy, The Candlestickmaker and The Pickle King is at the SkyCity Theatre, July 29-Aug 13