"What is the trouble with Asian men?" asks one of the cast at the start of Tamasha's verbatim theatre piece. "Nothing," replies a man in the audience to great hilarity. "Everything!" says a woman to more laughter. The trouble with The Trouble With Asian Men is that it never gets past a self-consciously jokey level of debate. As is often the case with this style of theatre that holds a microphone up to people's lives and lets them witter on, there are plenty of laughs. These come mostly from the subjects' lack of self-awareness and their habit of unintentionally revealing their own ingrained prejudices. However, there are very few real insights.
Whittling down 160 hours of taped interviews to 60 minutes, Tamasha's piece sidesteps the predominant media image of Asian men as shadowy, bearded figures of sinister intent, but it reverts to other stereotypes, including the sitcom-style helpless Peter Pans tied to their mother's apron strings. "We live together, but we have very separate lives - you've just seen me making the tea," protests the fortysomething single man who moved back home with his mum.
Part of the difficulty is that the question asked of the interviewees is too broad and too open to interpretation, and that the format of the piece doesn't allow for the development of narrative or for the audience to really get to know any of the individuals interviewed.
As a result, the show - although sometimes highly entertaining, enough to make you snort with laughter - amounts to little more than a series of overheard conversations on the tube. There are fascinating snippets of stories: the account of the Sikh boy who goes to get his hair chopped off, causing equal consternation among his family and the staff at Vidal Sassoon, or the one about the Peterborough breakdancing crew, two of whose members suddenly grow beards. Unfortunately, they never get a chance to develop. They're too good to be wasted.
· Until September 23 (box office: 0870 429 6883). Then touring.
