Assif Mandvi's one-man show won him the lead role in the upcoming Merchant Ivory film, The Mystic Masseur. It is difficult to see the piece as anything other than an audition on a grand scale allowing Mandvi to show his undoubted versatility. It is a completely charming audition, but less charm and more grit would give the undertaking more substance. At the moment it is a pleasant but light night out.
The evening begins as it goes on: wide-eyed. A young Indian, who has been offered a job in a New York restaurant run by a family friend, contemplates his glorious future as part of the American dream. Over the next 80 minutes his outsider's eye is turned on those connected with the restaurant: the boss and his wife, their son, their daughter, Sakina, and Sakina's fiancé. All of them find that the American dream is a little on the sour side if you are part of New York's south Asian community.
The tone is broadly comic, and each of the sketches is deftly developed and delivered. But while this exploration of Asian cultural identity may have been sufficiently new on the American stage to have won Mandvi an Obie award, British theatre has already explored many of the issues raised here with far greater complexity, humour and pain. What Mandvi offers is often too close to stereotype - there's the father appalled by the way his teenage daughter dresses; the airhead Sakina, who falls victim to both cultures; and her reluctant fiancé, who is under pressure to be a good Muslim son, but dreams of all- American girls and release. The isolated wife with a baby who gave up her own dreams for her husband's is another familiar character rendered interesting by the symbolism with which Mandvi describes her plight. This is a woman who gives up dancing and then forgets how to dance at all. This sequence has the power and sculpted nuance of a short story. Too much of the rest is mere padding.
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