Based on the 2013 novel by Sathnam Sanghera, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s stage adaptation of Marriage Material opened at The Lyric Hammersmith in May and transfers to the Birmingham Rep for one week.
Marriage Material is a retelling of Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel The Old Wives’ Tale, which was set in the Staffordshire Potteries towns in which Bennett grew up. Marriage Material is set among the Punjabi Sikh community in Wolverhampton, where Sanghera was born and raised. It’s a good match: stories of provincial lives, dominated by family and business, which feel a million miles away from national politics but which shape and are shaped by them.
It tells the story of two Punjabi Sikh sisters, Kamaljit (Kiran Landa) and Surinder (Anoushka Deshmukh), whose parents run a corner shop in Wolverhampton. The inter-generational tension is played out within a family torn between a desire to integrate and a wish to preserve their cultural identity. The girls’ world consists of the shop, the gurdwara and the laundrette, but Surinder is clever, and her teacher, Mrs Flanagan (Celeste Dodwell), visits their parents (Jaz Singh Deol and Avita Jay) and asks them to let her stay on at school and take her A Levels. But daughters are marriage material, and, after their father dies, which comes first: marriage and family or education and a new life in their new country?
The play is in two halves. The first half is set in 1968 and includes references to Enoch Powell and the Wolverhampton Transport Committee’s ban on bus drivers wearing turbans. The first generation Asian migrants formed a tight-knit community of extended family and neighbours, united by a desire to preserve shared values expressed through their faith. An independent business avoids the racism they might face in local factories, and it creates wealth to pass on to the next generation. If England is a nation of shopkeepers, then, as their neighbour Dhanda (Irfan Shamji) says, “inside these walls, we will be kings of England!”
In the second half, we jump forward to, I think, 2011, although it isn’t stated in the play or in the programme. The close, working-class, faith-based community of the first half has started to erode as the children of the first-generation migrants gain an education and move into the middle class. This creates tensions of its own as other identities such as class and gender start to intersect with their Asian identity, and the young, affluent British Asians struggle to work out who they now are. They have shed their parents’ accents, cut their hair, westernised their names—Surinder is now Sue—but the racism their parents faced is still there, and now they have to deal with it without the solidarity that sustained their parents.
And while the children of the first-generation Asian community prospers and enters the professions, deindustrialisation, which was particularly acute in the West Midlands, has spawned a resentful, white underclass who treat corner shops as food banks and regard shoplifting as wealth redistribution.
So there’s a lot going on here which, at times, Bhatti’s play struggles to accommodate. It’s a bit long for a night at the theatre, and the reallocation of roles in the second half means you need to keep your wits about you in order to work out who everyone now is. Some of it is a bit on the nose, and Mrs Flanagan’s lecture to Mrs Bains about how her Irish parents struggled to let their daughter embrace the opportunities available to her in their new country felt preachy. The acting style strays, at times, into 1970s sitcom territory, and you are always faced with the problem that novels and plays are different beasts, so it's got a rather novelish, untheatrical dramatic structure.
But it’s doing something interesting. It’s well-staged by Iqbal Khan on Good Teeth’s clever, folding, trucks-on-wheels set, the scene changes are beautifully choreographed by Anjali Mehra and the cast work their socks off.