When Rani Moorthy was a girl, her grandmother told her: "You have dark skin like me. What bad luck. You'd better be good at something." Fortunately, Moorthy developed into an incomparable storyteller; in 2004 she enchanted audiences with her one-woman social history-cum-cookery demonstration, Curry Tales, in which the crowd lapped up examples of her signature dishes.
There are no takers this time for Moorthy's patent lime-and-tamarind skin-lightening preparation, which stings like hell, smells atrocious and doesn't work. Yet she slathers herself in the noxious facepack nonetheless, to indicate the extremes to which Asian women will go to achieve a fairer complexion.
Shades of Brown is a 60-minute monologue that investigates the obsession with pigmentation, which Moorthy traces back to sacred Hindu texts - "our earliest lesson in racism". They describe evil gods as having a dark, Asiatic physiognomy, while kindly deities bear suspiciously Aryan features.
With the aid of some adept on-stage costume and makeup changes, Moorthy adopts a series of different personas: an albino woman who feels neither wholly black nor entirely white in post-apartheid South Africa; a scientist researching the variable pigmentation caused by the skin disorder vitiligo; and a ditzy Indian bride determined to become several shades lighter before the big day.
Moorthy is so sumptuously watchable that it's easy to forget there is only one of her on stage. Yet she is never more engaging than when she is simply being herself, throwing out seemingly unscripted riffs about white "tanorexics" roasting themselves beneath UV tubes while their dark-skinned sisters will do anything possible to go the other way. The manufacturers of skin-lightening products promise enticing tones of "medium wheat" and "beaten corn". But on the evidence of tanning shops and bleaching salons worldwide, it seems more likely that the future will be orange.
#183; Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0161-236 7110. Then touring.
