Octagon Theatre Bolton, Citizens Theatre and Wiltshire Creative in association with Derby Theatre

Written by Ayub Khan Din and Directed by Kash Arshad

Thirty years after its stage debut, and more than a quarter of a century after the hugely successful film adaptation brought the Khan family to a wider audience, East is East has lost remarkably little of its bite. Ayub Khan Din’s semi-autobiographical portrait of the Khan family, living above a chip shop in 1971 Salford and caught between cultures, generations and competing ideas of family, remains startlingly funny, uncomfortable and moving.

At its centre is George Khan (Bhasker Patel), determined to raise his seven children according to his Pakistani traditions, and Ella (Samantha Power), his English wife, attempting to keep the peace between an increasingly authoritarian husband and children growing into identities of their own. When George sets about arranging marriages for his sons, the fault lines within the family widen into open rebellion. It is a deceptively simple domestic conflict through which Khan Din explores much bigger questions of identity, belonging, authority and what children inherit from their parents.

Kash Arshad’s production is energetic and frequently funny, with moments of real emotional power, but this strength is also what occasionally exposes its weaknesses: Khan Din’s writing is so assured that you notice when the production works too hard to help it along.

Khan Din never allows the Khans to become merely an argument about multicultural Britain. First and foremost they are a family, and the domestic comedy isn’t separate from the darkness but essential to it. The jokes establish them as recognisable, irritating, loving, chaotic human beings, so that when George’s attempts to impose his authority become increasingly disturbing, the shift hurts. We have been invited to laugh ourselves into the family before being forced to confront what life within it can cost.

That tension between the public face of the family and its private reality is beautifully reflected in Rachana Jadhav’s design. At first glance the Khans’ 1970s home is rendered in reassuringly realistic detail, but gradually we discover that almost nothing is fixed. The company transforms the set before us: the kitchen frame pushes forward and counters slide out to create the family chip shop, complete with counter-top hood and delightfully “cheap-as-chips” chalkboard prices. The coalhouse, where Sajit (Rohan Macleod) retreats from the family tumult, remains visible, while another transformation produces the more formal parlour, with prayer mats and the family’s “best” brought out for Mr Shah (Sushil Chudasama)

There is something satisfying about a set which, like the Khans themselves, is constantly rearranging itself according to who is looking. Home becomes workplace; private space becomes formal receiving room; the untidy reality of family life is temporarily reordered into something respectable enough to display to visitors. The transformations are theatrically ingenious, but importantly they never destroy our belief in the reality of the household.

That sense of a recognisable family is strongest in the central performances. Bhasker Patel is excellent as George, capturing something archetypal about the authoritarian 1970s father while avoiding reducing him to a caricature. Patel’s George can be absurd and funny, but the production does not flinch when paternal certainty becomes coercion. Opposite him, Samantha Power is an absolute tour-de-force as Ella, a matriarch in spite of the circumstances, absorbing the competing pressures of husband and children while remaining the emotional centre of the household, and indeed of the production. Victoria Brazier provides a foil for Ella as Auntie Annie, neighbour, gossip and confidante.

Maya Dhokla is particularly strong as Meenah, creating a recognisable teenager and earning many of the evening’s biggest laughs without ever appearing to chase them, while Rohan Macleod gives Sajit a carefully observed physicality and tenderness, making him one of the production’s most endearing characters. Matthew Khan is also particularly enjoyable as “college boy” Saleem.

It is also among the siblings (including Zaki Ali as Tariq, Danyal Ismail as Abdul and Joeravar Sangha as Maneer) that the antagonisms and the shorthand of a large family are clearly established, but occasionally that familiarity seems demonstrated rather than inhabited. Some reactions are fractionally too large, comic beats fractionally too heavily marked. It isn’t that the comedy doesn’t land, it frequently does, but sometimes you can see it being aimed.

East is East doesn’t need that much assistance – in its best moments, this production trusts the situations and lets the humour emerge from the characters’ absolute seriousness about their own lives. The joke is funnier when they don’t appear to know they’re in one.

That matters particularly because the script is so adept at changing the temperature of a scene. Laughter can curdle astonishingly quickly, and what seemed like an entertaining battle of wills reveals the violence and fear underpinning it. Comedy isn’t a respite from the play’s cruelty; it is partly how we are made vulnerable to it.

Ultimately, it is that writing which remains the star of the evening. East is East can still provoke enormous laughter before turning that laughter back upon its audience, asking uncomfortable questions about belonging, masculinity, cultural inheritance and the limits of parental authority.

Arshad’s production doesn’t always find the consistency of tone and performance needed to make those shifts completely seamless, yet when it trusts the play’s delicate balance between comedy and cruelty, it is tremendously effective. Visually inventive, frequently hilarious and anchored by performances of genuine warmth and power, this is a good production of a great play, with tantalising moments when the two become equal. Thirty years on, East is East remains both deeply entertaining and genuinely challenging theatre, and there is real value in continuing to encounter the questions it raises.