As part of Bhuchar Boulevard’s Retracing Our Footsteps project Tara theatre hosts a reading of Balti Kings by Sudha Bhuchar & Shaheen Khan on Wednesday 31 July between 12pm-2pm for their South Asian Play Reading Group.
Originally produced by Tamasha Theatre in 1999 and remounted in 2000, and directed by Kristine Landon-Smith this story is set in Birmingham’s Balti Land, where Indian restaurants ruthlessly compete for custom, curry wars rage with price slashing and chef poaching.
Restaurateur Yahsin Anwar is on the verge of being swallowed up by the mighty Karachi Karahi. To ward off this threat, his family plan a grand re-opening where you can pile your plate for under a fiver and ‘curryoke’ into the night. But the temperature in the kitchen soon rises, as the chef is faced with the challenge of producing 35 dishes in five hours, hampered by staff whose personal affairs are also hotting up…
“The writing is excellent, sharply observant about the lives of the luckless wage-slaves in the kitchen. The acting has a superb understated naturalism…the smells of the Indian cooking as winningly authentic as the humanity of the characterisation.”