East is East, review: a provocative modern classic which might never get commissioned today

In retrospect the 1990s look not just like a renaissance period for new writing but a succession of vital, contemporary-minded provocations, produced in a climate of almost bygone free and easy self-expression.

Besides Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing (1993), about young, illegal gay love in working-class London, and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F**king (1996), about the consumerism-weaned ‘Thatcher’ generation, the pre-Blair years also saw Ayub Khan Din’s phenomenal debut East is East.

Having made waves as an actor he turned heads with his exuberant, fresh, autobiographical portrait of an Anglo-Pakistani family living in 1970s Salford. Its producers, Tamasha, hailed it as “the first play to be produced on the British stage that really gets under the skin of what it is to be of mixed race origin within the Asian community”. Critics agreed.

Now 25 years on, it’s back at the Birmingham Rep, where it premiered in the studio, helping reopen the main theatre, and marking the building’s 50th anniversary on what became Centenary Square (newly regenerated).

In a sense, it has never been away, not least because it was made into a film in 1999. But would it get commissioned today? In his programme notes, Khan Din suggests it would likely fall foul of interfering theatre progressives. The inference is that “white liberal” practitioners might well find the dialogue, featuring period-faithful slurs and negative stereotypes, problematic, and the application of comedy to ‘difficult’ subject-matter (the nature of being ‘a good Muslim’, arranged marriages, circumcision, domestic violence) a prompt for killjoy revisionism. It’s right – and brave – of him to point this out.

In a more sensitive climate, Iqbal Khan is directing the play at the Rep for a second time. Last time – in 2009 - I complained that the cavernous main-house swallowed up the domestic detail of this tough-edged comedy, with inaudibility a feature.

That drawback, unfortunately, recurs – there does need to be better projection (or amplification) and enunciation. Some of the scenes – episodic vignettes almost - also look clunkily staged against a distracting non-naturalistic backdrop suggestive of film-rolls.

Yet for reasons of its boldness, and our age’s timidity, I found it far more engrossing this time round. Sketching the noisy conflict between stern, strenuously respectable Muslim chip-shop owner George Khan and his six children (the seventh has absconded), with English mum Ella caught in the middle, it brings home the vexed identity issues facing first and second generation immigrants, at a time of permissiveness and high racial tension.

The cosy invitation to 70s nostalgia in the screen version, the space-hopper, isn’t seen here. Noah Manzoor’s Sajit, twitchy and Parka-encased, is constantly being whacked. Tony Jayawardena’s George (outwardly unyielding but hinting at pained confusion) slugs Sophie Stanton’s Ella many times for standing up to him.

It’s verbally shocking too. “I’ll tell you one thing, she’ll find it hard serving fish and chips wrapped up from head to toe in a bleeding bed sheet,” Ella rails, ranting about Khan’s first wife, who’s living in the contested region of Azad Kashmir.

By far the funniest scene involves one of the brood, Saleem (Adonis Jenieco) scandalising a guest, Irvine Iqbal’s pompous, putatively pious Mr Shah – intent on arranging two marriages with the family - with a graphic art-work. If it’s not, in parts, for the hard of hearing, on the whole it’s not for the easily triggered either. For that reason alone, it’s well worth a look.

Until Sept 25. Tickets: 0121 236 4455; www.birmingham-rep.co.uk; then at the National; www.nationaltheatre.org.uk Oct 7-30