Marriage Material – Lyric Hammersmith, London

Writer: Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti

Director: Iqbal Khan

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s panoramic exploration of Pakistani-British identity based on the novel by Sathnam Sanghera comes to the Lyric Hammersmith in a new adaptation that creates two distinct acts, one set in the 1970s and the other in the present day. Using the choice of who to marry and the cultural expectations placed on three generations of the same family, Marriage Material is often funny and insightful, but loses sight of its interesting sisterly dilemma when it departs from their story.

Running a corner shop in Wolverhampton with their first-generation immigrant parents, siblings, Kamaljit and Surinder are on different tracks as teenagers, with one hoping to become the wife and mother her community demands of her, while the intelligent Surinder demands a bigger life of her own. When their father dies unexpectedly, any plans to treat the sisters differently are abandoned, and marriages are proposed. A generation later, Kamaljit’s son discovers how integrated his family have really become when a 50-year-old secret emerges.

The first act of Bhatti’s play is really entertaining, set in the 1970s as the sisters discover their personalities and the interests that will come between them. Like The Buddha of Suburbia that played at the Barbican last year, there is a richness in the family scenarios that Bhatti creates, built around the corner shop but in a broader sense encompassing the expectations, pressure and aspirations that bought this one family to England and, for the daughters born in the UK, to dream of London and the freer time they hope for through the pop music they both love. Here, two worlds and multiple generations collide to create the possibility of something new, and in the rich texture that Bhatti gives her characters, this is warmly conveyed, a hopeful and welcome discussion of all kinds of British identities being forged in this period.

Act Two, however, loses hold of these threads, and while Bhatti pursues the same themes within a more overtly racist society, the sisters are sidelined, following instead the less artfully drawn experience of Kamaljit’s son Arjan. He is given a white fiancée and a career in London that he chooses to relinquish when his own father dies, but having spent 80 minutes already investing in one set of characters, Marriage Material struggles to start again, and Arjan’s story lacks the same sense of investment or jeopardy as the earlier tale. And, while true to the book, it is a shame that what was an important female narrative of mothers, sisters, and daughters becomes something else instead.

When Kamaljit and Surinder are eventually reunited – Kiran Landa and Anoushka Deshmukh playing all stages of their lives – the drama tells us nothing of their lives in between, and it feels as though the meat of the story has been passed over. Arjan’s (Jaz Singh Deol) dilemmas about whether he has leaned too much into his British identity are important but the play sells its main characters short by not spending the second act contrasting the lives they have made for themselves and ultimately what their separate and shared cultural identity means in twenty-first-century Britain.

Runs until 21 June 2025