Ayub Khan-Din's first play, East Is East, was about Anglo-Pakistanis in 1970s Salford. His new play is about a beleaguered Anglo-Indian community in 1980s Calcutta. The result is less riotous, but it shows a similar freshness and wit in dealing with a group of people bound together only by age, isolation and memory.
Dum Dum itself is an old colonial bungalow whose inhabitants are mostly in an advanced stage of decay. Muriel, suffering from a brain-tumour, is given to intemperate rages, not least against the British. Violet, in contrast, is a sparky survivor forever railing against the "natives" and reliving the Indian Mutiny. Dipso Daphne, meanwhile, desperately tries to repay the mortgage to the next door neighbour, a predatory Hindu fundamentalist.
The outsiders in this senior set-up are a widowed English arrival who "screams tea plantations" and a houseboy who is a former male prostitute and skilled Marilyn Monroe impersonator.
The picture Khan-Din paints is of a dwindling, bereft community torn between two worlds and at sea in an 80s India of increasing militancy: a point dramatically brought home in the final scene when the crypto-fascist neighbour, who dreams of a martial Hindustan, is forced to take refuge from a screaming student mob. But, as in his earlier play, Khan-Din finds surprising comedy in a serious subject. There is a delightful dottiness about Violet, who fills her room with viceregal portraits, and even about Daphne, who pines for her lost French lover while playing antique cabaret records.
Khan-Din is least convincing on the ogreish fundamentalist neighbour whose final exit makes little theatrical sense. But what the play reveals is an unpatronising sympathy for lost, inter-racial souls and a sharp eye for telling detail: memories, for instance, of a world where Anglo-Indians had to scrub elbows and knees with bleach to get into swish dances, and of a more recent India where the transvestite houseboy found his art reduced to appearances in wet bathing suits.
Stuart Burge's production faithfully captures Khan-Din's peculiar brand of exuberant pathos and there are good performances from Madhur Jaffrey as Muriel raging against the dying light, from Sheila Burrell, as the violent Violet repelling intruders with a cry of "Remember Cawnpore," from Diana Fairfax as the India-loving tea-planter who used to perform The Desert Song at Christmas, and from Paul Bazely as the sinuous houseboy who calmly announces "I was a male prostitute till I found my feet."
It all amounts to a touching portrait of a fast-vanishing world.
