Writer: Rudra Bharadwaj
Director: Nance Turner
After Jack’s mother had a large stroke, she was given a prognosis of just weeks to live. 16 months later, Jack is still responding to every ring of the bell summoning him to her bedside.
Rudra Bharadwaj’s Jack in the Box is a solo piece exploring the toll that long-term palliative care for a parent can take. Bharadwaj plays Jack as a young man who fails to hold down jobs (what seems to be a succession of working-from-home phone work) because providing for his mother’s constant needs means he can’t allow any time for his own life.
Bharadwaj presents the monologue with cheeky charm, especially in recalling Jack’s early days, when, as a young child, he went to a theme park with a larger group of friends and their parents. After sneaking onto one of the scarier “adult” rides (in a theme park, he muses, are any rides truly for adults?), his memory of his mother slapping him in front of everyone resonates throughout the rest of the piece. “One day you will understand,” the non-apology note he finds in his school jacket the next day reads. Jack in the Box feels like a lifelong quest for that understanding before it is too late.
In keeping with the theme park memory, much of the piece explores Jack’s experience as a series of emotion-themed rides in “Motherland”. Such flights of fancy allow Bharadwaj to utilise their physical theatre skills, expressing Jack’s frustration with his mother in abstract terms that still allow the truth of the situation to shine through. The metaphorical elements of such scenes also provide a more theatrical exploration of Jack’s inner turmoil than a monologue alone can.
Together with director Nance Turner, Bharadwaj has created a visual language that communicates the monotony, the heartbreak, the anger, and the sheer exhaustion that becoming a full-time carer can impose on a young person whose life is put on hold. And yet the care and concern are still there: when his mother suffers a second, more severe stroke, Jack’s attitude is contrasted with his aunt, who lives near to the hospital to which her sister is admitted but takes hours to arrive.
With his mother back home, now non-verbal and even more dependent, the repetition of care is shown through a prolonged series of moves: Jack changing sheets, attending to his mother’s hygiene needs, and logging times on a chart, all to a rhyme set to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel. If there comes a time during this routine when one believes that it’s gone on for too long, the further cycles emphasise that that is indeed the point – in Jack’s position, his whole life has become a repetitive drudge, extinguishing all sense of the self for either him or his mother.
The possibility of moving his mother into residential care, raised earlier in the piece but rejected because she is against it and Jack does not have power of attorney, returns near the end. Even then, with his mother now unable to talk and contradict her son’s assertion that she will love the care home’s garden, he knows it will be as much of a slap in the face as the one he received in the theme park. One day, she will understand, he muses.
It’s an astonishingly moving hour of storytelling. In their construction of this tale, Rudra Bharadwaj shows the full extent of their skills both as writer and performer. As this year’s Camden Fringe kicks into high gear, Jack in the Box sets a high bar for what we can expect to see.
Runs until 7 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
