Eastern exposure
Having set a million hearts aflutter on Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42, Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar are spreading their dark wings across odd little Bollywood cameos and great roles in Asian plays. I very much regret missing Rafta Rafta (Softly Softly), an old British family comedy (Bill Naughton’s All In Good Time) remade with a desi cast. Like Bollywood, British Asian theater gravitates to the kind of earnest, unironic theater which Broadway and West End abandoned to the heartland.
Adapted by Ayub Khan-Din (East is East), the play, which ran in London through summer and is now touring, stars Ronny Jhutti and Iranian Brit actress Rokhsaneh Ghawam-Shahidi as a young couple whose yin-yang is wilted by living with the parents. Rokhsaneh also did a production of East is East and a radio version of Maps for Lost Lovers:
Twenty-two-year-old Atul, a cinema projectionist, is a virgin on his wedding night, and so is his bride, Vina… As Vina’s mother Lata frets to her daughter about whether she has had enough of a sex education… Vina points out, “We’ve even got Indian lesbians now…”
Atul’s bride has given him a present of a BlackBerry, which he’s playing with, to the objection of his father, Eeshwar: “My father bought me a water buffalo for my wedding. I didn’t sit there milking it all night long!” [Link]
The story has its roots in the continuing post-war austerity of ’60s Britain, where lack of funds and affordable homes meant that newly weds were often obliged to reside with in-laws… [Link]
They are living with the groom’s family in a cramped back-to-back where privacy is rare. Atul’s father is a domineering patriarch who misses no chance to humiliate his son. And both sets of parents have their own sexual hang-ups which help to explain their progeny’s bedroom difficulties. [Link]
The real stars are reportedly Indian actor Harish Patel and Syal as the parents, with Pate singled out since he isn’t fluent in English and had to learn his lines semi-phonetically. Patel also plays a coach in the upcoming Britcom Run Fat Boy Run:
Harish Patel provides an irresistibly jovial and entertaining father, Eeshwar, who is not only slow to latch on to the problem his son is experiencing, but equally slow to comprehend how to communicate with him… [Link]
If you don’t know English how do you act in the language?
…. I may not know English grammatically, but I know all the lines of all actors, and I know exactly where I have to emote or emphasise…In Bollywood, you are slotted in roles according to what you look like and not what you are capable of. Because I am short and fat I can only be a comic actor or at most a comic villain and nothing else… And in London, there are more Indians than English, how can I miss Mumbai? [Link]
Living in New York, you pretty much take it for granted that you’ll get to see great indie and underground desi arts, but London seems to have a temporary monopoly on large-scale diasporic theater. I first saw Bombay Dreams there — much better than the New York version — and Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral, which I loved.
One critic wondered whether the staging by the National Theatre heralds true crossover:
It would be great if Anglo-Asians started taking an interest in mainstream British theatre - and if British people started making an effort to take notice of Anglo-Asian culture. A fair few Waspy types to go to Tara Arts shows, it’s true… [Link]
Have any of y’all seen this play, and how was it?
on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007, 6:17 pm in Theater › 
Email this
› 
Retweet
› 
Reddit this
› Link
› Reader links
It’s Ayub Khan Din, who wrote East is East, so imagine the ribald comedy of that play and movie. It’s OK, some funny scenes, some that don’t work, but being adapted from a kitchen sink comedy from the 1960’s, some of the social conventions don’t quite fit with contemporary British Indian life, it’s a bit of an awkward fit. It’s interesting that Khan-Din, from a Muslim Pakistani background, decided to make the family in this play from a Hindu background. I suspect he wanted to not have to deal with all the implications and dynamics and assumptions of Muslim life, people expecting commentary on the social pressures that lead to extremism and the appeal of fundamentalism in working class areas of northern England. In that respect, writing about a Hindu Indian family doesn’t have as much baggage in contemporary Britain, and he’s able to unselfconsciously focus on the family and comedy between the newlyweds and the parents. On the whole though, it’s fairly familiar stuff, broad social comedy of the East is East and Bend it Like Beckham school. In terms of British Asian theatre, it’s nothing really original or new — maybe it’s getting a bit stale, but at least it doesn’t deal in demonisation and sensationalism for a white audience, which is good, and which some theatre and drama tends to do these days. Meera Syal and Harish Patel are excellent.
I expect Channel 4 or some other independent production house will make a movie of it in a couple a years.
Thanks, Bobby, that was perfect. Then it’ll be turned into a stage musical before touring in Leicester. Seen anything fresh in this genre lately?
Nothing really fresh springs to mind. There was an innovative piece of dance theatre that ran for a few days at the National Theatre written by Parv Bancil and choreographed by the ballet dancer Dharshan Singh Bhullar about a relationship between a black man and an Indian woman that got good reviews recently but I didn’t catch it. There are so many productions that are fun, in the vein of ‘Fourteen Songs….’, but in terms of pushing the boat out, nothing incredibly innovative. On the other side you have these dire earnest dramas full of stereotyping written by Asian playwrights sucking up cash from theatre companies looking to fill their ‘multiculturalism’ quota, which always seem to me to be written for white audiences, you know the ’social problem’ plays, poverty is bad, oppression is bad, Asian men are bad, racism is bad, arranged marriages are bad, religions are bad, fundamentalism is bad, it’s like sitting in a sociology lecture, very earnest and self-satisfied, and written to ‘explain’ Asians to white people, you know, the patronising over-explanation of things, the false notes of dialogue, the whiff of orientalism in the settings sometimes. Then you have Tara arts who do these classical adaptations, plays about ancient India, Moliere transposed to colonial India, that kind of thing. They are dependable in their productions but they’re all just a little uninspiring, good, worthwhile but nothing breathtaking or amazing. Sometimes I find that the form is intrinsically awkward when dealing with certain Asian issues or maybe it’s just the quality of the writing. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier this year with an all Indian cast from acting groups across India was sensational though. The physicality of the actors, the direction was astonishing and one of the most exciting nights of Shakespeare I have ever seen in my life.
I just saw Run Fatboy Run. Yes, it was predictable and had lots of cheap laughs but it was fun. And harish patel did a great job. Wow, he learns his lines phonetically ? But I don’t think he’s escaped the body-type-based-type-casting that he accuses bollywood of.