The playwright Ayub Khan-Din clearly suffered from something akin to second-album syndrome. His first play, East is East, was a corker; in 1997, it won almost every award going, becoming a film a couple of years later, and arguably starting up the whole Asian contemporary comedy riff. A hard act to follow, and one that his two subsequent plays never managed. However his fourth, Rafta, Rafta . . . (meaning "slowly, slowly"), might have reclaimed the zeitgeist.
As in East is East, much of the comedy comes from the tensions experienced by a British Asian family where parents attempt to impose their old culture on a resistant younger generation. From its confident opening, where the exterior of a modest terrace in Bolton slowly revolves to display a two-storey family home crammed with the detritus of two kids and 20 years, Rafta, Rafta . . . moves along with ebullience.
The play is based on the 1963 Bill Naughton domestic comedy All in Good Time. Khan-Din has reworked the story to fit around the experiences of a contemporary Indian family, but the comic premise is the same. A newly married couple, obliged to live with the groom's parents, find it has a disastrous effect on their sex lives. I don't know how the original played, but retelling the story from an Indian standpoint makes Rafta, Rafta . . . a delight.
Right from the wedding night, when the young bridegroom, Atul Dutt (Ronny Jhutti), refuses to dance to bhangra in the traditional way with his father, Eeshwar (Harish Patel), domestic problems are on the cards. Atul sulks in an easy chair while Dad, hands waving and knees trembling, does an astonishingly agile prancing number around the lounge. Five minutes later, father is beating son in a bout of arm wrestling. No wonder poor Atul finds that his wedding tackle won't comply with orders, even though his bride, Vina (Rokhsaneh Ghawam-Shahidi), is nubility itself.
Rafta, Rafta . . . is another of those comedies that demonstrate how the Indian family has become the ideal template for British domestic drama. The notions of the strict (but loving) parents dealing with pushy (but loving) children, cross-generational nurture, and the oldies' attempts to perpetuate their customs and sobriety, may well have expired in the white British family unit, but we all understand how they operate in a "classic" Indian one.
Meera Syal, who is perfectly cast here as Atul's mother, Lopa, should take much of the credit for this. Through a sustained multimedia onslaught including novels, film scripts, plays and acting, she has managed to position her essentially comic vision of the rituals and personalities within Indian domestic life in such a spot that the Asian family now seems about as exotic and "other" as a Friday-night curry.
Though not painted in such glaring satirical colour as, say, The Kumars at No 42 (also featuring Syal), Rafta, Rafta . . . comes from a similar place to the television spoof. Here, however, the star is unmistakably the father of the groom. Harish Patel plays Eeshwar Dutt with such gusto and sympathy that Eeshwar, who is really a bit of a totalitarian bastard, comes over as a bit of a treasure.
There's a brace of clucking older women (Syal and Shaheen Khan, who plays the bride's mother) who spend all their time talking about their offspring and the haplessness of their husbands. There's a clutch of younger men whose minds are full of Bollywood fantasy. And there's the married pair. At one point, Atul's younger brother brings home a pair of lovebirds for the still-unconsummated couple. "Will they lay eggs?" someone asks. "No," comes the reply. "Lovebirds never breed in captivity." And so it is for the newly-weds. In the end, the virginal couple manage to get away on honeymoon. To Blackpool. In a way, the unambitious location is in keeping with the play, as Rafta, Rafta . . . is more a confirmation of things we already know than a presentation of challenging concepts and moral positions. As a gentle and rather old-fashioned night out, however, it works.
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