Fine performances, dismal play - East Is East at Chichester Festival Theatre
Birmingham Rep and National Theatre have revived East Is East by Ayub Khan Din to mark the play’s 25th anniversary.
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Hide AdSimply to have acknowledged the play and quietly moved on might have been kinder.
It’s played with skill; it has its moments; but ultimately nothing about the show convinces that this was a piece particularly worth selecting from the vast pool of challenging, thought-provoking, amusing dramas which we might have been watching tonight.
Indeed, there are scenes which – far from being revived – really ought to have had “do not resuscitate” scrawled all over them, particularly a first-half discussion of suicide, played for laughs, which really oughtn’t to have a place on any stage anywhere at any time.
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Hide AdIn a sense, the play is sunk from that moment – even without its depiction of domestic violence and even without its portrayal of the youngest son of the house, a poor lad clearly in the grip of all sorts of obsessional mental-health problems. Again, he’s played for laughs – laughs which really, really aren’t funny.
Presumably the justification is that this is a depiction of certain attitudes at a certain moment in history. If so, can we expect Love Thy Neighbour and On The Buses to be coming soon?
In the end, it’s all rather dismal – which is a shame given there are a couple of fine performances.
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Hide AdTony Jayawardena is excellent as the father of the Pakistani family we are watching in 1970s Salford – a man incapable of living by anything other than the rules of the India he left 40 years before, a man incapable of accepting that those rules inevitably will have very little meaning for his children who have never lived there.
Jayawardena convincingly creates a monster, a man out of time and out of place and whose ultimate resort is violence. It is a powerful portrayal.
Opposite him, Sophie Stanton as his long-suffering British wife Ella, manages to evoke a certain poignancy when she finally stands up to him.
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Hide AdBut quite why we are watching this is difficult to say – a family more concerned with removing its youngest son’s foreskin than they are with the suffering he endures. It’s a strange play that presents a child refusing to leave his smelly coat as somehow funny.
There’s too much that’s not remotely likeable about the play – a period piece about an era 20 years before which offers little to edify and little to amuse.