How do you fancy taking your mum on stage and reliving all those rows you had with her about, er… getting married? This has proved to be a winning formula for actor and founding artistic director of Toronto-based Why Not Theatre, Ravi Jain. Playing opposite his real mother, Asha, who reassuringly tells us she’s not an actor, A Brim Full of Asha explores a collision of generations and cultures, Indian and Canadian, where attitudes to matrimony are metaphorically and literally worlds apart.

As the audience filters into the theatre space, we are greeted by Ravi and Asha, who graciously shake everyone’s hand. They invite us to help ourselves to a homemade samosa from the stacked white dishes on a table behind them. That puts us in a good mood! But it’s a clever move; we get the feeling we’ve been invited over to ‘their place’.

As the familiar strains of Cornershop’s hit song fade, Asha Jain begins by welcoming us to her ‘home’. She says that what we are about to see is not a play, but a dispute with her son – one as old as the world itself – that of parents struggling to control their children and their children’s resistance.

Ravi was born to Indian parents in Toronto. As a first generation Canadian, he has grown up and been exposed to a new cultural rule set. His parents meanwhile, are hanging onto theirs. Ravi has already broken most of their expectations by not going into Law or Medicine. A life in theatre just doesn’t register to them as a ‘proper’ career. Worse, now advancing into his twenties, his mum and dad feel it’s high time he found a nice ‘girl’ to marry, preferably someone from the ‘old country’, so that his connections with it will remain through his life and be passed on. The Canadian in Ravi must trump the overwhelming drive within his mother to arrange a marriage for him, before he has had a chance to fulfill his desire to fall in love before committing to a life-long partnership.

Part narrative, part theatrical cameo, Brim Full of Asha runs like a cat and mouse game, where Ravi believes he is striking out independently only to find his parents have muscled surreptitiously into his plans and are still calling the shots. As a young man in the ‘free world’, Ravi is by turns exasperated, then enraged, by his parents’ interventions. As well as telling his own story, Ravi does a great job of portraying his proud dad, his conniving uncle and his potential dates, as we follow his attempts to keep his interfering parents at bay.

Asha, in a moving aside, describes her own journey. Married in her early twenties to a man settled in Canada, she leaves her beloved home for a new land where, although she experiences happiness, is haunted by loneliness. She describes a culture where the power of malicious gossip alone can be enough to drive many into early, arranged wedlock.

Brim Full of Asha is a hugely enjoyable reveal of otherness – a world where dowries and grandparents’ influence still count, and where partners are potentially found via online bio stats or through newspaper ads.

Bellowed laughs of recognition or of sympathy from an enthusiastic audience peppered this performance. Ravi and his mum will undoubtedly continue to make friends wherever they take this redemptive story.     ★★★★☆    Simon Bishop    18^th May 2017