Unsuitable Girls
Contact, Manchester **
Big on bhangra and dreamy rebellion, this new play, set in east London, is a shameless pastiche of the Bollywood romance, with plenty of dancing, lip-synching and enough insipid lines to recall the most cringe-worthy love story. Not to mention the many obstacles and incidents that prevent the two intended lovers from getting together.
Like Ayub Khan-Din's huge hit, East is East, Unsuitable Girls, by Guardian employee Dolly Dinghra, addresses issues familiar to British Asians - arranged marriages, generational tensions and modern life's threat to religion, tradition and place - but lightly and with little moralising. It is more of a spectacle than a play.
Keith Kahn's set boasts a backdrop of vivid spirals, a turning wall of coloured tubes, and a raised bedroom in gaudy burgundy and brown. Extras in Gap slacks and trainers strut round the large stage, poised to leap into dance when the bass-heavy bhangra kicks in, and, at times, the actors look lost in the space.
In a precarious blend of the earnest and the whimsical, the plot follows 28-year-old Chumpa, who has aspirations to be a journalist and no longer wants to marry her fiance, Ashok. Shelly Conn is captivating as the clever and beautiful heroine forever frustrated by her circumstances. One moment she is a no-nonsense go-getter (with a Cockney accent) trying to find a better job and a more suitable husband, the next she is a naive Bollywood-obsessed romantic enchanting everyone with a smile. And she can dance, too.
However, her character is given a few scenes of such cloying sentiment that you have to look away, or else laugh in embarrassment. And this is symptomatic of the play's main failure: it occupies an uneasy territory between social comment and pastiche, between a drama that has its own dynamic and an entertainment that is all affectation. There is simply not enough material to carry the narrative beyond its references.
There is much witty commentary on Asian culture, though occasionally it descends into Goodness Gracious Me farce, and the majority of the characters, though wilfully paraded as caricatures, do little to develop interest. In the end it's the dancing above all that you'll remember.
Until December 2. Box office: 0161-274 0600.
