BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Bend It Like Beckham cooks up a line to set the pulses racing 

By Baz Bamigboye for the Daily Mail

Published: 18:36 EST, 16 July 2015 | Updated: 20:06 EST, 16 July 2015

Natasha Jayetileke and Tony Jayawardena who play Mr and Mrs Bhamra in Bend It Like Beckham

Gurinder Chadha came up with a hot new line in the musical Bend It Like Beckham about how to cook pulses.

It’s delivered by Natasha Jayetileke, who plays Mrs Bhamra, mother of Jess, the student who supports Manchester United and adores David Beckham.

Natasha and Tony Jayawardena, who plays her stage husband Mr Bhamra, are the musical’s anchors. All the action involving Jess (Natalie Dew) and her big sister Pinky (Preeya Kalidas) revolves around the Bhamras.

‘During rehearsals, Gurinder was emphatic that she wanted me to say a new line,’ Natasha recalled, while taking a cream tea at the Dean Street Townhouse.

Chadha, who wrote and directed the film version and performed the same duties on the terrific musical (one of the year’s best new shows) at the Phoenix Theatre, said that Mrs Bhamra has to tell Jess that they’re going to be cooking daal ‘in the pressure cooker’. In the show, the line gets a huge laugh.

And the actress has overheard people repeating it on the train home — though they never recognise her because on stage she wears a grey wig and a fat suit. Tony interrupts at this point: ‘It’s like she’s wearing a duvet!’

Natasha continues: ‘You have to remember that Gurinder’s family are from the Punjab and mine are from Sri Lanka.’ As are Tony’s.

Indeed, Natasha’s family came up to see the show and afterwards had supper. ‘I said: “Do we cook daal in the pressure cooker?” And they looked blankly. Because in Sri Lanka we don’t cook it in the pressure cooker. We boil it.’

Both Natasha and Tony were born in London: he in the North, and Natasha in the West. They have worked together before, but this is the first time they’ve played a married couple.

Natasha remembers being taken to musicals as a child because her dad loved them. She was hooked when she saw Jesus Christ Superstar. Tony recalls going to see the short-lived musical Metropolis. ‘I’ve been very lucky, because people don’t expect an accent of received pronunciation to come out of the mouth of someone who looks like me,’ he said, smiling.

He has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the National Theatre.

‘I mean, where are all the terrorists’ roles?’ he wisecracked.

But behind that comment is proof that, slowly but surely, casting directors are putting non-Caucasian actors in ‘regular’ parts. Certainly more often than a decade ago.

‘We get to play lawyers — and doctors,’ said Natasha, who studied ballet and then, while at Cambridge, fitted in as much extra-curricular drama as possible.

I hope Howard Goodall and Charles Hart, who wrote the music and lyrics, and producer Sonia Friedman leave the pressure cooker line in the show’s album, to be released soon.

Tara's act of madness 

Tara Fitzgerald is preparing to be driven mad.

Fitzgerald will star in Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight playing Bella Mannington, who is being deliberately tormented by her husband Jack Mannington in an act of pure Victorian villainy.

The husband’s fiendish plot is based on the knowledge that Bella’s mother was ‘not well’ when she took her own life. But there’s a twist. Well, of course there is.

Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer appeared in the famous movie version in 1944.

The play will be directed by Lucy Bailey, with designs by Bill Dudley, and will run at the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton from October 16.

Tara Fitzgerald will star in Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight playing Bella Mannington, who is being deliberately tormented by her husband Jack Mannington in an act of pure Victorian villainy

Watch out for... 

David Morrissey, who will star in Martin McDonagh’s new play Hangmen. Morrissey will play Harry, who was a hangman until he retired and opened a pub in 1965.

Reece Shearsmith plays Harry’s assistant.

The play will run at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Downstairs from September 10, with an official first night on September 18.

It’s a coup for the Royal Court to get Morrissey and McDonagh in the same gig.

David Morriset who will play Harry in Martin McDonagh's new play Hangmen at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs from September 10, with the off

Vicky Featherstone, the Royal Court’s artistic director, told me that the playwright wrote the piece (which she described as deliciously dark, surreal and brilliant’) speculatively — and ‘through various means it managed to land on my desk’.

It paints a picture of a man who, thanks to his former career, has become a local celebrity, and looks at how he deals with that. It is a role that Morrissey, one of our best actors, will be able to ‘totally inhabit’, she added.

Featherstone said McDonagh’s work also questions whether our society has moved on from the ‘narrow-minded world’ of the era when hanging was abolished. After reading the piece, she thought the answer was no — ‘Actually, we’re still that society.’

The cast of 12 also includes Sally Rogers as Harry’s wife and Johnny Flynn. Matthew Dunster will direct.

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