UNABLE to bring Bollywood in its entirety to the Western masses, Kristine Landon-Smith, whose brain-child was the unforgettable East Is East, has done the next best thing.

By selecting only the essential lavishness and exuberant delight of Indian histrionics, she has convincingly brought the gyrating gaiety of the Bollywood big-screen to the small stage.

"It's a feel-good, wonderful, delightful musical, which has moments of quite great sadness," she says of her new production, likening the story, with its focus on death, love and the family, to a Shakespearean play.

Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral - a gimmicky title that shrewdly capitalised on the famous film that was released at the same time of the play's first showings - is adapted in English from Hum Aapke Hain Koun, the biggest grossing film in Bollywood history.

"The film was a huge hit in India," she says. "And in a way, this is why we have done so well in London."

"It's because the Asian audience, who have come to see it, know the film terribly well, and, funnily enough, because some of them come along quite sceptical, thinking, 'I love the film, but how can I possibly enjoy it on stage?'

"But I think people find it incredible, because it's quite faithful to the film, even with a cast of just 10, and four dancers."

She says that Bollywood movies, despite existing as an essentially native-Indian phenomenon, are now an integral part of British Asian popular culture.

"Tons of British Asians like Bollywood now," she says. "They love them.

"I think it's becoming a bit of a cult thing, they find it is something they own."

But how is this style of play received by Western audiences, unaccustomed as they are to the frenetic dance set-pieces, distinctive visual style and intentional ham-acting that characterises the Bollywood genre?

"On the whole they've loved it. But at times they have not been sure how to take it.

"It's clear to me that the genre is tongue-in-cheek and slightly melodramatic at times.

"It's very interesting. Because they are not familiar with the genre and it's from a different cultural context, we have had people say to us at the interval, 'It's so wonderful! It's so funny!....But am I meant to laugh?'

"They're just not quite sure.

"But if there's a really mixed audience and the Asian audience laughs from the word go, it sort of gives the others licence to understand it."

While Landon-Smith is aware that British people may be drawn to Indian film and theatre because they see it as an exotic and culturally genuine experience, she is also mindful of the fact that negative racial representations of India, and indeed Eastern countries on the whole, continue to feed Western societies a myth that is at best annoyingly cliché, and at worst, downright offensive.

"This play and our other body of work does start to redress the balance.

"But you only really scratch the surface, because the audiences you get for theatre are not the same as you would get for television.

"I think Indians are represented as stereotypes in television. It's changing a bit, but you still see the 'corner shop owner'.

"Goodness Gracious Me has done something to redress the whole perception of Asians.

"People now think that Asian people have quite a significant presence in the arts, and that they can be very funny. I don't think people thought that before.

"All these things are starting to redress the balance. It's quite a long road, really."

She does say, however, that since Tamasha, the production company she co-founded in 1989, came about, Indian theatre has become increasingly accepted on the national scene.

"We were very marginalised in the early days, but it has progressed.

"We are now playing middle-scale venues in London, filling 700 seats a night.

"No one five years ago would have taken that sort of risk with us.

"They saw us as a marginal company, only appealing to a very niche audience, and, of course, that just simply isn't true."

Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral is showing at The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre from Tuesday April 3 to Saturday April 7.

Steve Berriman