East Is East began life in 1996 in Birmingham Rep's studio, so it is a measure of how quickly Ayub Khan-Din's comedy has established itself as a modern classic that Iqbal Khan's revival now takes place on the main stage.
It is not the first play to look a little lost in the Rep's cavernous auditorium. Simon Higlett's design seems to send the whole street plan of Salford gliding by, and it's very handsomely done – though it does look a bit like a space-filling exercise when all the play really requires is a sofa and something to suggest a chip-shop counter. The rest is supplied by the rhythmic clash of Khan-Din's hilarious Urdu-Mancunian dialogue.
The choicest lines belong to George, the tyrannical paterfamilias, whose speech is a marvellous slew of profanities, tenses and euphemisms, such as the "tickle-tackle" belonging to his uncircumcised son, Sajit, who has withdrawn from the world into a tatty green parka, which he refuses to remove. The tickle is eventually tackled and Sajit is compensated with a new watch – though, as his aunt points out: "It's not much of a swap."
The original play now seems a little diffuse in comparison to the film, with the action slowed by a dispensable scene on a canal bridge (the cue for another hunk of expensive-looking scenery) in which the Khan clan discuss the fact that their mixed parentage leaves them in cultural limbo. I think we've got that point by now.
The acting is unfailingly good, however. Archie Lal's inarticulately frustrated George enables us to understand the character's explosions of violence, if not to condone them. James McGlynn gives a wonderfully sympathetic portrait of the reclusive Sajit – or at least, his parka does. You have to take it on trust that McGlynn is inside.
