East Is East

In 1971, Ayub Khan Din was the youngest of 10 children, his mother a white Englishwoman who had taken the bold (and rare) step of marrying a Pakistani immigrant. Life wasn’t easy. The close-knit neighbourhoods of Salford’s back-to-back terraces were drenched in a growing tide of anxiety ignited three years earlier by Enoch Powell’s now infamous ‘Rivers Of Blood’ speech.

In East Is East, his 1995 autobiographical play and screenplay (it was a hugely successful film four years later) Din returns to the conflicts of his youth and sets the play in 1971, in the build-up to the Indo-Pakistani War – played out here on the nightly news. Obviously, it is a play about race. But it is about so much more. It is about families. About control within families. About how fathers and mothers relate to their children. About parental sacrifices, arranged unions and thwarted ambition.

It is also a comedy, albeit one with an intensive dialogue peppered with words like ‘Paki’ – Khan has made no attempt to PC his script. The words incidentally are spoken not by the English, but by his own children.

George Khan, the overpowering father, known as Genghis to his children, arrived in the UK in the late 1930s and now spends his life running a chip shop – his dreams of impressing the Iman thwarted by his marriage outside of the Muslim faith. Din’s decision to play George himself is a bold one but one that comes off – he has lived this life and these lines.

Jane Horrocks as Ella, his wife, mother of six and mainstay of the deep-fat fryer, is genius at patrolling the cultural barrier between her husband and his offspring. Her children want to be British. ‘She looks like a prostitute,’ George screeches at his daughter Meenah’s kneelength skirt – played by the stunning Taj Atwal.

‘It’s her school uniform!’ Ella replies deadpan.

The younger members of the cast weave in and out of the play with impressive sophistication. Ashley Kumar as the third son, Tariq, turned rebel schoolboy, Nathan Clarke as Saleem, hiding his artistic tendencies, Darren Kuppan as Maneer, embracing his father’s faith but ultimately not his aggression and Sajid, played by Michael Karim, for whom life is a parka coat.

Tom Scutt’s set appears deliberately claustrophobic, with the outside terraces forming a clever skeleton for the internal scene shifts. All the laugh-outloud lines are delivered by neighbour ‘Auntie Annie’, deftly played by the adorable Sally Bankes. Her full-flow entry into a sari-dressed afternoon tea is worthy of the very best of British farce.

Until 3 January 2015 at Trafalgar Studios, 4 Whitehall, London SW1: 0844-871 7632, www.trafalgartransformed.com