A packed Richmond Theatre was buzzing with excitement on Monday evening for the first night of Ayub Khan Din’s exhilarating and very important play East is East. The audience was varied and lively and the play had clearly attracted lots of new people to the theatre which is great to see. Tom Scott has produced a wonderfully clever set evoking the atmosphere of 1970s Salford with its Coronation Street back to backs. Brilliantly the set allowed for scene changes to made within seconds just by moving a few items of furniture. So for example the change from front parlour to chip shop is rendered by simply wheeling into the room the frying counter and lights.
From the first scene to the last East is East is entertaining, powerful and engrossing. The whole cast is superb with every member playing their role with great accomplishment. More clearly than the film version I could feel that this was George Khan’s tragedy. Perhaps because the writer Ayub Khan Din was also playing the lead role I felt much more powerfully what an emotional ordeal George is undergoing.
Married to an English woman, wonderfully played by Jane Horrocks, with 7 children, George has been in England since 1936. He struggles to maintain his traditions and his connections to his beloved Pakistan. One sees that he is authoritarian, paranoid – in a wonderful comic scene in the hospital, where his youngest son Sajit has gone to have a circumcision aged 14. George asks the surgeon if he is Indian, not trusting them as they are supporting East Pakistan in the 1973 civil war and a wife beater and yet he is also a man with a sense of honour and a strong belief in God and family.
The scene where he breaks down and weeps, was for me King Lear like in its pathos. Utterly compelling. For this insight alone East is East is worth going to see. But there is much, much more to enjoy. The Comedy is hilarious. The scenes with Auntie Annie checking to see if Sajit still has his foreskin or reminiscing about suicides in the neighbourhood is side splitting. The comic masterstroke is the introduction of Art student Saleem’s portrait of a virgin with real pubic hair to the parlour as Mr & Mrs Shah visit to arrange marriages between their daughters and two of the Khan boys.
The relationship of Britains Muslim communities and the mainstream of our society is clearly going to be a very important issue for all of us in the years ahead. I think East is East has so many crucial insights into so many complex issues that it deserves as wide and as varied an audience as possible. Lord Reith founded the BBC on three principles to “ inform, educate and entertain”, East is East does all three in spades.
Don’t miss it.
