PATRICK MARMION reviews Marriage Material at the Lytic Theatre: Catherine Cookson meets The Kumars in a sweet Sikh sitcom

Daily Mail​

30-05-2025

Marriage Material (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith)
Nobody does family quite like Indians do.
For sheer intensity of generational bonds, they are hard to beat – as we discover all over again in the new stage adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera's epic Wolverhampton-set novel Marriage Material.
But what's really fascinating about the story of two Sikh girls in Sixties and contemporary Britain is its secret nostalgia for old-fashioned patriarchal ways.
We start in a red-brick terrace among first-generation Sikh immigrants, Mr and Mrs Bains (Jaz Singh Deol and Avita Jay), running a corner shop and demanding that bus conductors be allowed to wear turbans.
It's a formidably male-dominated culture and although their daughter Surinder (Anoushka Deshmukh) is a plucky brainbox studying Thomas Hardy, her suspicious mother dismisses education as stopping people sleeping at night and making them 'force their toilet in the morning'.
That line is greeted with howls of recognition, but the other daughter Kamaljit (Kiran Landa) makes herself a very happy marriage with hard-working, top-knotted Sikh-pride traditionalist Tanvir (Omar Malik).
Indeed, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's stage adaptation works much better as a hymn to traditional Sikh values, and misses their dramatic edge in a modern-day second half where everyone is culturally adrift.
What feels like a Catherine Cookson yarn of hard work and adversity winds up becoming more like a Kumars sitcom.
White characters are painfully two-dimensional and there is some truly risible dialogue. Even so, Iqbal Khan's epic production has an irresistible sweetness.
Jay nails the conflicted ambivalence of the Indian matriarch, while Landa takes up her baton as her shy but passionate older daughter who falls for Malik's proud young Sikh, and Deshmukh locates the pain of the younger daughter and her desire to escape. For all its faults, just like family, it commands our loyalty.
Until June 21, then at Birmingham Rep from June 25-July 5.
The Beautiful Future Is Coming (Bristol Old Vic)
Verdict: Smoke but no fire
Rating:
By Georgina Brown
In the foyer of Bristol Old Vic, a newly planted field maple is flourishing, vivid green.
Unlike the burnt, drowned landscape depicted by Flora Wilson Brown in this impressionistic, depressing play about climate change.
The first of three tenuously related threads provides a trite historical backdrop. In 19th century New York, the patriarchal Royal Society rejects a paper about the greenhouse effect, penned by Phoebe Thomas's Eunice, corseted wife of supportive John (Matt Whitchurch), because she is a woman 'hobbyist'.
The most absorbing strand is set in now-ish London, where Dan (outstanding Michael Salami) has fallen for his boss (Nina Singh). It's all teasing and sex until Daniel's mother drowns in a flood that, like the fires, are routine and catastrophic.
Overwhelmed with fury and despair at a system which has allowed his mum's body to lie undiscovered, becoming hideously bloated, Daniel's inarticulate grief has a depth of feeling and eloquence lacking elsewhere.
The least credible couple live in an imagined future (cue silly outfits). A heavily pregnant Ana (Rosie Dwyer) and her gormless colleague Malcom (James Bradwell) are scientists trying to germinate seeds in a rudimentary trough (unlikely).
Cut off by a storm (as if), and now sharing their last flask of water (absurd — it has been raining for months), this is neither the place nor the time to bring a new baby into the world.
The play's optimistic title suddenly appears bitterly ironic. 'How can you think about flooding in three years when now is taking all your attention?' someone asks. Which is perhaps Brown's point. With every day a firefight, fears about the future get sidelined.
Director Nancy Medina's staging has an impressive fluidity with scenes gliding into each other through sliding panels. But the narratives fail to coalesce into a cohesive, satisfying drama.
While climate change is indeed a burning issue, the play feels like a work in progress: all smoke and no fire.
Until June 7.
Marie And Rosetta (Rose Theatre, Kingston)
Verdict: Raising the roof (of the church)
Rating:
We should all know about the pioneering gospel singer and guitarist Rosetta Tharpe, recognised by the musical cognoscenti as 'the godmother of rock 'n roll', a source of (acknowledged) inspiration for artists ranging from Little Richard to Johnny Cash, Elvis to Aretha Franklin.
American playwright George Brant puts this forgotten heroine back in the spotlight she deserves.
His play focuses on a life-changing moment: when Sister Rosetta invites a beautiful young gospel singer to join her on the road.
Rosetta wants to get back to into the good books of the evangelic church, enraged by her raunchy secular songs with Cab Calloway in the Cotton Club. But first she has to teach Marie to put some swing in her voice and (more important) swagger in her hips. 'You can swing it for me, and I can church it up for you,' Rosetta cries.
The magnificent Beverley Knight captures Rosetta's warmth and generosity, body and soul, encouraging Ntombizodwa Ndlovu's gauche 'shy violet' to open up like a passion flower, become bold and brazen.
Bouncing off one another with energy and spin, their terrific talents combined, their powerhouse rendition of 'This Train' raises the roof, a duet made in heaven for, as Rosetta puts it, a God 'who don't want the Devil to get all the good music'.
Set in a Mississippi funeral parlour, where the women are staying because black people were not permitted in hotels in the segregated South in the Forties, they rehearse for the first time before their tour to warehouses and hangars — the only places black folk can congregate unnoticed.
The rehearsal over, the play loses its way and the rest of Rosetta's life — she married three times, lost a leg, had a stroke and, dirt poor, was buried in an unmarked grave — tumbles out...all telling, no showing.
But when this dynamic duo sing, the piece soars.
In Kingston till tomorrow (May 24), then Wolverhampton, and Chichester.
Also showing...
This Is My Family (Southwark Playhouse)
Verdict: Flat-pack family
Rating:
As a vision of domestic life, This Is My Family is an innocuously generic, flat-pack musical that feels like it could be knocked up from diagrams with Allen keys.
First seen in Sheffield in 2013, Tim 'Calendar Girls' Firth's show is about a nuclear family in which the 13-year-old daughter wins a competition enabling her to take mum, dad and brother on holiday anywhere in the world.
In typical Firth form (following Neville's Island), that means a wet staycation in a woodland.
Dad (Michael Jibson) is a DIY-enthusiast who's a die-hard trier, Mum (Gemma Whelan) is an eyeball-rolling moaner, exasperated by his money-saving schemes.
Their gothic son (Luke Lambert) lives in a kitchen cupboard, grandma (Gay Soper) is drifting into dementia and a randy aunt (Victoria Elliott) has a good gag about Wookey Hole.
And they're capably led by teenage Nicky (Nancy Allsop), mixing Aled Jones with Roald Dahl's Matilda.
Directed by Vicky Featherstone, the Royal Court Theatre's former boss, the production completes the B&Q look with Chloe Lamford's set of a fold-away fitted kitchen.
But if you're hoping for more than flimsy sitcom stereotypes, you may be disappointed. Equally, it's perfectly inoffensive, slots together neatly and doesn't look too wonky.
Until July 12.