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Theatre CHARM is an undervalued quality in the theatre these days, but this delightful one-man show proves just how winning it can be. The film producer Ismail Merchant certainly fell for it. On seeing Sakina's Restaurant off-Broadway in New York, he immediately signed its author and performer Aasif Mandvi, to star in the title role of his new film, The Mystic Masseur, based on a novel by the Nobel Laureate VS Naipail. If you like Merchant/Ivory films, you will love Sakina's Restaurant. It is warm, intimate, humane, and just a touch sentimental. Rather than challenging its audience, it offers the artistic equivalent of a warm, comforting bath. And sometimes that is very welcome. The leading character is Azgi, a young Muslim who leaves his village in the subcontinent to start work as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in Manhattan. "I like hamburger, baseball, and Mr. Bob Dylan... I am the first person in my entire family to fly on an aeroplane," Azgi confides with a huge, innocent smile on a face, and he's so sweet, vulnerable, and touching that you want to put him in your pocket and take him home. But Mandvi doesn't confine himself to the overworked, incessantly cheerful waiter. In a tour de force that never seems merely flashy, he also plays the restaurant owner, Hakim, Hakimçs wife Farrida, their two children, Sakina and Samir, and both Sakinaçs American boyfriend and the Indian boy she was betrothed to when she was seven. All these characters come to vivid life in a series of deft, revealing scenes that capture all the confusion, exhilaration, and pain of being an Indian immigrant in New York, and the clash between American and subcontinental culture and values. Following the September 11 outrage, this affectionate view of moderate Muslims In Manhattan seems especially valuable, and, if all that weren't enough to pack into 80 minutes, Mandvi also adds haunting little folk tales from India, which reflect on the nature of identity, ambition, and the meaning of home. The show is a touch too soft-focus - Azgi scarcely loses his great grin even when he's Relieved of his wallet on the subway - and you can't help feeling that, initially at least. He would have been lonelier than he lets on. But the piece is more often affecting And true, and often cuts deep with the lightest of touches. There isn't a hint of embarrassment when Mandvi plays female characters - he has A lovely androgynous grace about him - and he consistently manages to be simultaneously funny and poignant, never more so than when the devout Indian medical student Sakina is destined to marry finds himself irresistibly lured by the charms of a New York tart with a heart. This gentle, perceptive show generates so much warmth you could warm your hands by it, and Mandvi, as both writer and actor, is clearly a cherishable new talent. Tickets: 020 7610 4224  Sakina's Restaurant Bush, W12 by Benedict Nightingale WE'VE seen plenty of shows in which innocents from abroad gaze in wide-eyed wonder At Times Square, but precious few as engaging and original as Sakina's Restaurant. This is a one-man play with six characters, all of whom are played by its author: Aasif Mandvi, who is Indian born, British bred, New York resident, and currently starring in Merchant-Ivory's latest film, The Mystic Masseur. Mandvi is a largish man, but, when we meet him, his grin is larger still. He's Aski, who has wrested himself from a doting mother on the subcontinent in order to start at the bottom of the Manhattan ladder, which means being a waiter in one of the many Indian restaurants on East 6th Street. It goes without saying that both his smile and his hopes wear thinner with time. As all the characters discover, dislocation means cultural confusion, and cultural confusion can be painful. Aski's boss, Mr. Hakim, is at odds both with a son wedded to his Gameboy and with a daughter who doesn't want to wed the earnest Muslim boy to whom she's long been betrothed. And his wife, in her own giddy view "a very talented and mysterious woman", is fretting at a life, which consists of doing the cooking and trying to evade Hakim's awkward sexual advances. The problems Mandvi evokes will be familiar enough to every British Asian, and to every non-Asian who has seen East is East on stage or screen. It's the quality of his acting that makes them special. Aski's trademark bounce turns into a wince and wiggle, and suddenly Mandvi is the frustrated Mrs. Hakim. Then he's sprawling across a table as the Hakim daughter, the ultra-Americanised Sakina, unsuccessfully tries to resist necking with a boyfriend who cançt understand arranged marriages. That's beautifully observed, but not as striking as Mandvi's portrait of Sakina's young Brother, who sulks beneath his reversed baseball cap after being forced to go to "ugly, Stinky, smelly" India for his grandmotherçs funeral rather than take a trip to Disney World to meet the Ninja Turtles. And even if that doesn't match the pathos of The thinly bespectacled fiancé who can't believe his eyes and legs have led him to The room of a prostitute who looks like the gorgeous American girl who sits beside him In science class. "I've been trying to deepen my religious faith," gasps this boy as terror overwhelms him. "I'm a Muslim, do you know what that is? Yes, you're right it's a type of cloth". That's funny and not without a point. What preoccupies Mandvi's all-Muslim characters is passing exams, pleasing their parents, worrying about their children, having fun, finding contentment, and somehow trying to reconcile Asia with America. They'd be worth meeting any time, but never more than now. |
Warmth
and charm from a man of many parts