I've written a blog for the Guardian site on the National Theatre's failure to say sorry for the delay of an hour last Friday in getting the show on the road at the Lyttelton theatre. So no more about that here.
Rafta, Rafta...(Slowly, slowly) is an adaptation by Ayub Khan-Din, who wrote East is East, of Bill Naughton's 1963 comedy All In Good Time about a young couple who can't consummate their marriage because they have to live under the same roof as the husband's interfering parents. Readers of this blog will know how much I enjoyed Nicholas Hytner's successful updating of The Alchemist and The Man of Mode. This is a well-deserved hat-trick, I think. The traditional British family and its values seem to be dying out, and the only families where children have to respect and obey their parents are Asian. Hytner isn't the first director or writer to have spotted this -- I remember Tanika Gupta's clever Asian makeover of Hobson's Choice at the Young Vic three years ago. In the Alchemist, Hytner turned Abel Drugger into a geeky young Indian pharmacist and in The Man of Mode, set in trendy 21st century London, the young lovers who disobey their parents are Asian. Here again, playing the Indian card seems to work brilliantly. Ayub Khan-Din's script is extremely funny, managing to be true to Naughton's original concept at the same time as delivering something coherent and new. The casting is excellent, though Harish Patel (a veteran of comedy roles in India) steals the show with exquisite timing as the tactless and overbearing paterfamilias Eeshwar Dutt, who has never even tried talking to his son. Meera Syal plays the mother, though this part doesn't quite allow her to display all her comic gifts. I also liked Ronny Jhutti and Rokhsaneh Ghawam-Shahidi as the young lovers. The set designer Tim Hatley has created a two-storey doll's house, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room which frames the play beautifully. I don't know what they'll think of it up in Bolton, but I liked it and so did the audience.
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