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Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti works her themes and relationships like roti dough in this Indian comedy-drama, set around the kitchen island of a suburban family home. ‘Behtzi’, her last play for the Birmingham Repertory Company, closed after protests about its depiction of rape in a Sikh temple. Ten years on, this slow-cooking Royal Court co-production meets instead with smiles of recognition.
Widow Jeeto (Sudha Bhuchar) hasn’t stopped grafting since she arrived on the plane from the Punjab in ’69. Her son Pal (Rez Kempton) has inherited her tenacity and his late father’s whisky habit as well as the family shop. But he has his own all-consuming project: a care home for elderly Asians that proves as solid an investment prospect as an Ibsen orphanage. Meanwhile his English wife Liz (Lauren Crace) longs for a baby and finds a nurturing strength in the adopted rituals of the Indian kitchen.
At heart, ‘Khandan’ (Family) is an exploration of the universal tension between family and fortune, and its particular pertinence to second-generation British Asians. How can you seize your own future when your parents had to work 80-hour weeks to secure it? Bhatti’s iPad and iPhone-peppered script is also sharp to the contemporary im-ping!-ements of technology on home-life.
Throw Pal’s salon-owning sister Cookie (Zita Sattar) and studious cousin Reema (Preeya Kalidas) into the mix and this feels like the omnibus of a superior soap. While subdividing audience sympathy, Roxana Silbert’s production misses some theatrical peaks. But there’s an absorbing warmth to the play’s depiction of British-Asian life, played out to endless cups of char and rounds of roti. In the face of UKIP’s rise, perhaps this is more provocative than first appears.