The Ajoona Guest House

When you combine an accomplished wordsmith with an excellent actor and tell a story of the edges of life, and the brutality of both yes and no answers to the big questions about who a person can be, you get a moving and challenging play.

The play centres around the Ajoona Guest House where the main character has lived and stayed at various times when he has been in India, and his relationships with the other occupants both past and present. The play throws a searching light on the life of expatriates in India and their individual choices. But most interestingly and emotionally, it follows the narrator’s struggle to choose his own life and the cost of doing so.

Stephen House wrote the play and acts the three main characters - the narrator, Sydney and Rosie - and brings many more to life in his descriptions of their interactions and his acted responses to them. He carries the audience backwards and forwards in time and in and out of conversations and relationships with the flick of his head, a change in his stance and curl of his mouth.

Stephen uses the whole stage and his words to create a variety of locations. The physical space is supported by clever and responsive lighting by Julian Adams and the evocative sound design by Alain Valodze.

This is a wonderful, engaging mix of humour, pathos and real courage.

Ruth Richter

Photographer: Darren Gill

Flora Georgiou also reviewed Ajoona Guest House

Travel writing can be a self-absorbing exercise for the writer and can sometimes be a little tedious for the audience but not so in Adjoona Guest House. Stephen House has written and performed a searing tale about his time in New Delhi, when he was once a bright eyed and bushy tailed teenager; he revisits his haunts thirty years later, sows his seeds and rounds up his muses.

The stage is bare and dark - the lighting is minimal. House dictates his movement with colourful and descriptive prose. He speaks directly to the audience while maintaining a fervent connection to his place of memory.  There is a teary sadness in his voice when he recalls his youthful years in New Delhi, working as a film extra in Bollywood films in the late seventies with his friend Rosie, together making friends with the locals and living at the Ajoona Guest House - cheap residence that attracted the down and out types such as junkies, prostitutes, pimps, criminals and how nothing has changed after so many years.

House masks his own truth and blurs his past via his lurid descriptions of the people that were once his close friends and the now new young street urchins that grace his presence. He tells us he kicked his heroin addiction, skimming the surface; he could have delved deeper into his own psyche and given us more of who he is and why and where and how he felt as a young junkie living in the seedy underbelly of New Delhi. He glazed over personal details that would have added more depth and colour to his overall poetic performance.

Ajoona Guest House is the third play in a trilogy of stand-alone monologues, set and written in three world cities over ten years. Almost Face to Face (Dublin) was the first Appalling Behaviour (Paris) the second and the now much heralded third instalment Ajoona Guest House. An award-winning poet, playwright, and actor, House is a defiant and singular uncut diamond, giving voice to the many unheard voices.

Flora Georgiou