Rokhsaneh Ghawam-Shahidi
& Ronny Jhutti in Rafta, Rafta...
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The Young Vic got there first. In 2003, Tanika Gupta reworked Harold Brighouse’s classic comedy Hobson’s Choice, the action hilariously reset amongst a contemporary Salford rag trade Asian family. It was staged in a production by Richard Jones that had the audience promenading outside the theatre to attend an Asian wedding ceremony in a nearby church hall.
Now another British Asian playwright, Ayub Khan-Din, has done a lovely job of transposing another, more forgotten, 1963 Northern comedy All in Good Time. The original play was written by Bill Naughton, best known for writing the 1966 film Alfie. Here, as Rafta, Rafta... it is transplanted into a contemporary Bolton milieu, where a newlywed young Asian couple have forgone a honeymoon to begin their married life by setting up home at the groom’s parents’ house.
If Nicholas Hytner’s production forgoes the audience promenading, he and his designer, Tim Hatley, make the set do a pointless bit of it. At the beginning of the show, we watch the house rotating into view on a revolve, after which this unwrapped doll’s house sits centre stage and doesn’t move again.
Meera Syal in Rafta, Rafta...
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Rafta, Rafta… translates as “slowly, slowly”, and the play does take its time to find its comic engine, just as the newlyweds take their time to consummate their marriage. But like the best of Alan Ayckbourn or Mike Leigh, Khan-Din is layering a portrait of his characters with sharply defined observation so we become intimate with the intricate family dynamics that are being played out.
Twenty-two-year-old Atul, a cinema projectionist, is a virgin on his wedding night, and so is his bride, Vina. They are both first generation Brits of Indian-born parents. The play lightly touches on the cultural and generational differences that are now part of their heritage. As Vina’s mother Lata frets to her daughter about whether she has had enough of a sex education—“I knew nothing when I married your father… It all took me by surprise. The shock of it”—a friend replies, “Girls are different today. They have agony columns and Richard and Judy.” And Vina points out, “We’ve even got Indian lesbians now.” Meanwhile, the men are also talking marriage. Atul’s bride has given him a present of a BlackBerry, which he’s playing with, to the objection of his father, Eeshwar: “My father bought me a water buffalo for my wedding. I didn’t sit there milking it all night long!”
[AD]But the play that Ayub-Din has fashioned so freshly from Naughton’s original milks the comedy for all its worth. And director Hytner—who a few months ago cleverly interpolated the idea of Asian arranged marriages into his marvellous updating of the Restoration classic The Man of Mode—brings it to teeming, gleaming life, with an exemplary cast that includes the wonderful Bollywood actor Harish Patel as the father of the groom (who is sweetly played by Ronny Jhutti) and Meera Syal as the groom’s mother.
It’s also important to point out how exciting it is to find a play about Asian home life here. Though there have, of course, often been Asian actors on the National’s stages and plays like Tartuffe have been staged in association with the Asian company Tara Arts there, this is a breakthrough moment. Like Bombay Dreams was in the West End, Rafta, Rafta... is bringing contemporary Indian life into the mainstream theatre.
Rafta, Rafta…
By Ayub Khan-Din
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
National’s Lyttelton Theatre