It is 15 years after Idi Amin expelled 70,000 Asians from Uganda. Acid house is playing in Manchester’s clubs and everyone is taking ecstasy. Working in a tailor’s in the city’s Northern Quarter, the two younger Hobson sisters only need the scantest excuse to take off their saris and dress like Mel and Kim. None of this sounds like the play Harold Brighouse set in a Salford boot-makers in the 1880s but, brought forward a century by playwright Tanika Gupta, it has a sharp political parallel and a very funny cultural context.
Returning to an adaptation she’d previously set in the modern day, Gupta paints Brighouse’s patriarch as a man so grateful to Edward Heath for welcoming Uganda’s Asians to the UK that he has become a dedicated British Tory and changed his name to Hari Hobson. Played by Tony Jayawardena as a comedy King Lear, he is part of a generation who turned to business to escape adversity. This self-aggrandising and pompous man may be a figure of fun, but his dedication to keeping the family alive is genuine. Jayawardena makes you think he’s not entirely in the wrong.
His daughters make you think otherwise. Sparkily played by Shalini Peiris, Safiyya Ingar and Maimuna Memon, they can’t decide whether to obey Hobson, as custom dictates, or laugh in his face. The conventions of Brighouse’s Victorian Salford find an equivalent in a Hindu community where elders are to be respected and arranged marriages are the norm – at least, for as long as the younger generation plays along. It’s a tension that keeps the laughter coming in Atri Banerjee’s deftly choreographed production as it dances across Rosa Maggiora’s sewing-box of a set.
Peiris, as eldest sister Durga, is at the play’s heart. Written off by her father for being single at 30 yet the most clear-sighted of them all, she has the wit of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing but has to construct her own Benedick before she can get ahead. Step forward the talented but timid clothes-maker Ali Mossop (a hilariously twitchy Esh Alladi), who gives her Cinderella story a happy, and surprisingly erotic, ending.
• At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 6 July.
