Clash of family members worlds apart

EAST IS EAST

Opera House, Manchester

BACK in 1996, Ayub Khan Din, fresh from a role as a pony-tailed business man in “Coronation Street”, wrote an apparently broad Northern comedy set in Salford in the early Seventies.


The difference between this comedy and dozens of others of its kind is that it was partly biographical — the youngest, anorak-wearing member of the family is based on the author — and partly that it was one of the first plays to put the modern experience of being a Muslim in a Western society to the test.

George Khan — here played superbly by Din himself — is an autocrat within his family: his word is law as he attempts to hang on to a sense of Muslim and cultural orthodoxy that demands his wife and children obey his every word.

The trouble is that his beliefs are the antithesis of the life led by his mostly grown-up children, who, thanks to their white English mother (Jane Horrocks), have generally grown up keen to run their own lives.

It’s a fascinating play that explores, comically but with remarkable depth, the plight of family members caught between two worlds, with arranged marriage rejected and father’s orders the subject of mass rebellion.

And there aren’t many comedies keen to go down the path of showing violence within the family, as chip-shop owner George takes his frustrations out on the people he considers to have thwarted him, mostly his wife.

Din’s play might be set in a world that no longer exists in the same way — if anything, the divisions between Muslim and white populations are more polarised than ever were — but at its heart is a human rather than religious dilemma: a father unwilling, for whatever reason, to become redundant to his children.

Din and Horrocks are a strong comic pair in — thanks to director Sam Yates — perhaps the clearest of productions I have seen of this show. The family members, too, are more than a match for the script - and their on-stage father.