Marriage proposal I just couldn't refuse!

WHEN Iqbal Khan was approached with the idea for a new production of a resonant family saga rooted in the West Midlands, he was immediately captivated.

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"I loved the scope and ambition of the story," the director says of bringing Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera's novel Marriage Material to the stage.

"It slightly scared me, the idea of 'how will we tell that story, in one evening, and on the budget we have?'

"But Gurpreet's voice is so witty and transgressive and emotional and emotive, I couldn't wait to embrace the challenge."

Eighteen months on, Marriage Material presented in a co-production with Lyric Hammersmith - is heading for the Birmingham Rep's main house for a 10-day run.

The funny, touching and tender story is set in a Punjabi Sikh-owned Wolverhampton corner shop where, over the course of half-a-century and three generations, the Bains family endeavours to run a business against a backdrop of great change: societal, cultural and personal.

Sathnam was directly inspired by Stoke writer Arnold Bennett's 1908 cross-generational masterpiece The Old Wives' Tale, although you can arguably feel echoes of the Dashwood sisters in Austen's Sense and Sensibility too.

And in her adaptation, while the modern day is represented by Arjan, a young graphic designer with a white metropolitan fiancée who is drawn back to Wolverhampton by a family tragedy, Gurpreet has also chosen to centre the wider story on the experience of the family's two daughters - dutiful Kamaljit and her younger, boundary-pushing sibling Surinder.