Ms Singh in the living room with a rapier

Rehearsal photos: Matt Martin - Shooting Theatre

Daniel Nelson

The drama mounts to a crescendo as rules are broken and the arguments between the five characters become increasingly heated. Suddenly the confusion climaxes in a moment of family violence: mum flips the Cluedo board over, sending the pieces flying.

Everyone freezes in shocked silence. 

It’s absurd. A play in which the most dramatic moment is a board game?

It’s as though the tired old days of that tired old staple of English theatre has been resurrected: a “drawing room comedy” in which genteel upper-class characters fenced with wit and verbal banter. 

But Passing at the Park Theatre is not tired, old or absurd. It’s British, but it’s also a sharply scripted, convincingly acted investigation of first and second generation migrants, of Britishness and Indianness, of being  mixed race, of racism and how to deal with it.

It’s funny and moving, honest and humane, and about convincingly real people. The action is driven by daughter Rachel, who wants to affirm her Indian cultural roots by organising the Singh family’s first-ever marking of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.(“I’m scared that I’m missing out on things, losing things, that were supposed to be passed down to me through our family.”) Writer Dan Sareen bravely makes her seem both courageously questioning and occasionally annoyingly crass.

She scratches away at the absence of Indo influences in her Indo-British family, to the bemusement of her Anglophone father, white mother and sardonic brother. 

The play is also partly an Unromcom, as the fate of Rachel’s eager-to-please boyfriend (who attended the same school but didn’t notice the subtle racism) hangs in the balance. (“Suddenly I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be here.”)

The play is part of a deepening, widening river of probing, thoughtful writing by and about the children of migrants.  And it’s tremendously entertaining.

* Passing is at the Park Theatre,: £15/ £25/: £9, 13 Clifton Terrace, London N4 3JP, until 25 November. Info: https://parktheatre.co.uk/