Theatre Royal: Curry & chips

The hilarious West End hit East Is East arrives at Theatre Royal Brighton

Following a sensational West End run, the modern comedy classic East is East opens at Theatre Royal Brighton next month. Written by the acclaimed playwright Ayub Khan Din, and starring the hilarious Pauline McLynn (Father Ted, Shameless and EastEnders), East Is East was originally performed in 1996 and was later made into a world renowned film.
The play takes as its raw material the cultural clashes Khan Din witnessed as he and his nine Anglicised siblings, brought up in a crowded Salford household with a Pakistani father and a white English mother, fought against the straitjacket of Muslim tradition.

Khan Din’s father had left Kashmir in 1929, worked his passage to the UK and eventually settled in Salford. Yet having defied his own father to come to England and marry an Englishwoman, he tried to dominate his own sons, to make them work in the family chip shop and marry brides chosen for them against their will, whom they had never met before.
“He tried to squash in his own kids the spark of rebelliousness that he had. It was always ‘I’m your father. You’re Pakistani. Do as I say.’” explains Khan Din. No one dared ask him “If Pakistani women are so great, why did you marry my mum?” – “You’d have got beaten up. He was a very big man.”
“My parents had a fantastic relationship except when it came to the kids because my mum always supported us,” he explains. “Whenever someone wanted to do something other than work in a fish and chip shop there would be a massive argument.”

The playwright’s alter ego is a traumatised boy called Sajit who spends half his time hiding in the coal shed and wears a huge Parka like a comfort blanket. Like much of the play, the Parka is based on remembered experience. “I lived in it for months and no one really bothered me. I only took it off to have a bath.”
Like Ayub, many of Khan Din’s brothers took a creative path away from their father’s orbit, through art school or hairdressing. Half of them turned out gay. “He never got on with my brothers who were gay. He came to accept my other brothers who had married English girls and the grandchildren.”

Both Khan Din’s parents died before the play premiered. What does the playwright think his father would make of East is East? “I don’t know. In later life he had a lot of regrets but it was too late for him to do anything about them. At that age he would have appreciated it and laughed with it and probably learnt something from it.”
Don’t miss this “best of British” comedy when it opens at Theatre Royal Brighton before a UK tour.

www.atgtickets.com/brighton
0844 871 7650
Thu 11 – Sat 20 Jun
Mon – Sat eves 7.45pm
Thu & Sat mats 2.30pm