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Drawing on his grandparents’ stories, Vinay Patel’s new play ‘An Adventure’ is an unlikely epic, mixing domestic ordinariness with wide-screen continent-crossing drama. Teenage Jhoti is obsessed with Bollywood movies: she wants excitement, not marriage and kids. But under pressure from her dad, she reluctantly agrees to marry, and gets swirled into a kind of adventure she never planned for.
You might expect a play that draws on the writer’s own family history to be rose-tinted or sentimental, but Patel mixes affection with cold-eyed realism about what this couple did next. Jhoti and husband Rasik move to ’60s Mau Mau rebellion-era Kenya, where they buy a farm so they can rent it to David – a local farmer banned from owning property by racist laws. This decision comes to define their lives, especially as David is eventually crushed by the government his landlords also claim to hate, while they flee to the safety of Britain.
‘An Adventure’ takes in six decades, but Patel’s tripartite play wisely focuses in on three brief snapshots of time. The next part of the story is an intriguing look at Jhoti’s time as a trade union activist, swept up in Asian female garment workers’ furious protests against racist factory practices in ‘70s Britain. And the final part, set in the present day, confronts all the hypocrisies and frustrations buried in this couple’s story, from Jhoti’s anger at her child marriage to the family they left behind, to the friend they betrayed.
Bush Theatre boss Madani Younis’s stark production makes this tangled story feel clear and lucid, mirroring Jhoti’s thwarted longing for celulloid-worthy greatness in two huge screens on each side of the stage. Clocking in at just over three hours, this epic could probably be a little pacier without losing its elegiac, cinematic feel.
But with the reliably wonderful Anjana Vasan playing the fiery, deeply principled woman at its heart, it’s tough to begrudge this play a minute – it undercuts real warmth with moral ambiguities that, like Jhoti, will not be ignored.