Family in a pickle

Shelley Silas's pleasing but flawed play focuses on India's Jewish population - for 200 years a thriving, integrated and unpersecuted minority but now almost vanished.

Calcutta Kosher, acclaimed earlier this year at Southwark Playhouse, starts as a study of deracination and the abandonment of a unique culture but turns quickly into an amusing but repetitive family feud.

Mozelle (Jamila Massey) is the mischievous Calcutta matriarch who has summoned her two daughters - Esther, now a prissy north London housewife, and Sylvie, a tart-tongued LA harpy - to her deathbed for a surprise announcement.

It turns out that Maki, the proud and devoted servant girl, is Mozelle's love-child by a low-caste Hindu who worked in the family's pickle factory. Who, then, inherits the responsibility for keeping the flame of Indian Jewry alive?

Silas shows how, in leaving India, the two older daughters abandoned Hindustani, religious observance and a love of spicy food. All three daughters are bonded by blood ("and pickle", Sylvie adds), but each has her own agenda regarding Mozelle.

Silas has a way with a comic setpiece and she writes wicked oneliners, doling them out equally to Mozelle and to Shelley King's caustic Sylvie. She is not so hot on plot, however.

The situation drives the characters, rather than vice versa. Sylvie and Maki flit between reconcilement and animosity, Mozelle between a wicked manipulation of her daughters' emotions and pleas for forgiveness. That the matriarch frequently nods off, enabling everyone to discuss her, seems too convenient.

Janet Steel's direction is pedestrian, emphasising the clumsiness of the scene-setting and the circular nature of the arguments. Shelley King and Jamilla Massey, however, have great fun with their reprehensible, changeable characters, and Seema Bowri is a watchful presence throughout as Maki.

Calcutta Kosher shines a frustratingly brief spotlight on the odd, hybrid culture it sets out to illuminate, but its attendant comic pleasures are a consolation.

Calcutta Kosher