Review Round-Ups

Jane Horrocks shines in East is East

Horrocks steals the spotlight in the Trafalgar Transformed revival of Ayub Khan Din’s award-winning comedy

Michael Coveney
WhatsOnStage
★★★★

Ayub Khan Din's 1976 Salford family comedy remains a classic template for British Asian domestic drama down the years, and the marvel of Sam Yates's superbly cast revival – with the author himself playing the Muslim paterfamilias – is that it still works as a cunningly engineered drama of assimilation and resentments… The inequality and difficulty of this mixed marriage – charted with unforgiving candour in the writing – is further exacerbated in the brilliant, resilient but still doll-like performance of Jane Horrocks as an unlikely Ella Khan (a world away from Linda Bassett's in the original and in the film)… This son is perfectly played by Nathan Clarke, but they're all good and cleverly delineated… Khan Din presents a monumental figure as George, a Muslim version of Harold Brighouse's Horatio Hobson 60 years earlier… Those same red brick back-to-backs and outdoor coal sheds are beautifully evoked in Tom Scutt's set, which incorporates scenes in the chippie, the kitchen and the adjacent alleys as if in a dream.

Sam Marlowe
The Times
★★★★

Ayub Khan Din's 1997 debut play remains sharply relevant… Fierce, funny and affecting, it’s also a joy – and it’s delivered with infectious verve in Sam Yates’s revival for the Trafalgar Transformed season with a cracking cast led by Jane Horrocks and Khan Din himself… A tougher, more terrifying George would give Yates’s production greater edge, but there’s still gut-wrenching emotional heft to scenes in which Ella is ripped apart by her helplessness and conflicted loyalties or where George sobs alone at an empty table in his deserted chippy… The kids, too, are richly drawn and played with irresistible elan… The writing is hard-hitting and saltily exuberant… A set by Tom Scutt that crams on to the stage an entire cramped neighbourhood in all its curtain-twitching claustrophobia, it feels thrillingly vital… A play with guts, wit and a big, beating heart.

Paul Taylor
Independent
★★★★

There are few plays that manage to be so delightful and discomfiting at the same time as East Is EastSam Yates's splendid revival now in the Trafalgar Transformed Season is notable for several reasons… It brings Jane Horrocks back to stage in a terrific, gutsy-yet-sensitive portrayal of Ella… Ayub Khan Din's performance skilfully manages to bring out what is tragicomically impossible about this interfering, overbearing figure the sound of whose approach sends his children (played with immensely appealing, fractious verve here by a crack cast) into wild scrambles of cover-up and air-freshening… Without sentimentalising him in the slightest – the sudden outbursts of wife-beating are sickening – the author lets you see that this man knows deep down that he's a lost, fearful soul, no longer able to keep a grip on the precarious world… Sally Bankes [is] sublimely funny as Ella's staunch friend Annie… It hasn't dated the piece, though, which has prescient touches and is still brilliantly alive in its verbal comedy… A great night out.

Jane Shilling
Daily Telegraph
★★★★

Sam Yates‘s revival at the Trafalgar Studios is an intriguing commentary on what – if anything – has changed… Tom Scutt‘s terrific set beautifully evokes the claustrophic squalor of the Khan’s overcrowded Salford terrace and the chippy where the children are expected to work after school… Sally Bankes‘s high-energy performance as the gossipy Catholic neighbour, Auntie Annie, lights up the stage, and the final scene, a disastrous betrothal tea-party, is a comic gem… Elsewhere there is a sense of the production’s being slightly undercooked… Horrocks‘s performance is as the redoubtable Ella is polished and Taj Atwal is sparky as Meenah… Khan Din gives a curiously hesitant performance as George: both his violence and his charisma are oddly muted… Without its captivating central monster at full throttle, there are moments when the drama loses energy and focus.

Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard
★★★

Jane Horrocks returns to theatre, after five years away, with an intelligent portrait of a Seventies housewife struggling to stand up to six wilful children and a despotic husband… She brings a lovely chirpy resilience to loyal Ella in Ayub Khan Din‘s semi-autobiographical play about immigration and identity, first seen in 1996 and getting a welcome revival… Khan Din also takes the part of Ella’s husband Zahir… Though a little tentative, he captures the hypocrisy of this abrasive but tragically weak man.
It’s the resentful, inventive kids who drive the play’s comedy… Director Sam Yates ensures that the moments of slapstick detonate, and there is an enjoyable showdown between George’s family and the snobbish couple… The grimmer scenes of domestic abuse seem contrived, and the production doesn’t always feel sharply focused… Any opportunity to see Horrocks onstage is a treat.