Reviews West End & Central Published 22 June 2014

Khandan

Royal Court, Jerwood Upstairs ⋄ 11th - 28th June 2014

Family ties.

David Ralf

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti is known especially for the controversy surrounding her 2004 play Behzti, a play which features scenes of abuse, rape and murder in a Sikh temple. The Birmingham Rep production was cancelled following violent protests two days into the run, and the play later won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The author reflected on that controversy in her 2010 play Behud, but outrage and censorship arose again in Bhatti’s work when she revealed that she had been asked to remove a particular line from a Radio 4 drama commission about so-called ‘honour killings’, Heart of Darkness. Her latest play, in a production by Birmingham Rep and The Royal Court, is a family drama, drawn away from the role of religious communities, and focussed closely on the internal pressures of a khandan of first- second- and third- generation Punjabi expatriates living in England.

The son of a shopowner, Pal (Rez Kempton) spent every school night behind the till and has put everything into running the place since his father died. Now he wants to sell the shop and start a new business, to his mother’s (Sudha Bhuchar) horror. If he had his way he’d even sell their little plot of land back ‘home’ – which he has never seen, but to which his mother dreams of returning. Pal’s wife, Liz (Lauren Crace), a white woman who has immersed herself in her husband’s family’s culture as far as she can, is desperate for a baby. Now Reema (Preeya Kalidas), a relation from India is coming to stay with them, with a more level-headed vision of their ‘home’, and the fresh determination of starting a new life for herself.

While aspersions may have been cast on the craft of Behzti as it became the centre of a news narrative – one academic (who as a sociologist may have been speaking beyond his sphere of expert judgement) called the play ‘a clumsy patch-work quilt with weak and hurried stitching’ – Khandan is a piece of pure writing craft, with the depth of feeling and attention to its characters of an engrossing novel, the killer dramatic scenes of a TV drama, and the space for big ideas to gently revolve in the mind which only really happens in the theatre. It never-feels too ‘well-made’, but the pace and focus don’t let up either. While some of the tensions that affect each member of the family are a little familiar – I’d be really interested in a culturally specific take on alcoholism, but the notes hit here don’t punch through the tired representations of problem drinking onstage – on the whole this slice of family saga feels like it should – like we’re trespassing on the impossibly private business of a family who would do anything but broadcast their struggles.

With the audience on three sides of the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, and religious icons and family pictures on the walls above our heads, we are located within the kitchen-diner, making us eavesdroppers from the outset. When the action finally moves, the change is appropriately jarring, and just as designer Jamie Vartan controls the main space with subtle control of the walls, the final location is handled brilliantly with control of the floor. As Pal and his mother try to start their lives again in straitened circumstances, still with his father’s example hanging close over their heads, the play reflects on the difficulty of shuffling off the influence of the patriarchy in the familial sphere, and whether in fact, the two are inseparable.

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David Ralf

David Ralf is a writer and critic in London. He won the Sunday Times Harold Hobson Award for reviewing at the ISDF in 2012, and the Kenneth Tynan Prize for his reviews for the Oxford Theatre Review in 2011. He draws pens and doodles at Pens by Pens.

Khandan Show Info


Directed by Roxana Silbert

Written by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti

Cast includes Sudha Buchar, Neil D'Souza, Preeya Kalidas, Rez Kempton, Zita Sattar

Link http://royalcourttheatre.com/

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