The title of Ayub Khan-Din’s funny, poignant new play is Urdu for slowly, slowly and also the opening of a song about how a wife becomes part of her husband. All In Good Time is the name of the comedy which Bill Naughton wrote 46 years ago and on which Khan-Din based Rafta, Rafta. Both are pretty apt, for the subject is a loving marriage which remains unhappily unconsummated six weeks after it began.

Back-to-back Salford is the setting, as it was with Naughton, but the characters are now of Indian stock. And that fits the situation pretty well. Where but in tight-knit Asian communities, especially in the North, are you now likely to find brides who are virgins when they marry, bridegrooms of comparable naivety and parents who hover over them like, well, those in Khan-Din’s hugely successful East Is East?

The only serious problem with Nicholas Hytner’s production is the Lyttelton stage. The blend of bedrooms, living room and kitchen that Tim Hatley has built on it are too large and comfy for a terrace house said to be poky and meant to be claustrophia-inducing. Nevertheless, Khan-Din still manages to convey his main point.

After all, how can a young couple hope to flourish in a place where their marriage night begins with the collapse of their bed? Where the bridegroom’s father is apt to fart loudly as he visits the adjoining loo? And where the same old boy invites bride and bridegroom to “tap on the wall any time of the night, I’m a light sleeper, so I don’t mind?”

That’s just one of many lines affably spouted by this character that reduced last night’s audience to hilarity and took an enjoyable but far-from-classic play into comic orbit. Harish Patel is a Bollywood star unfamiliar to me but, on the evidence of his Eeshwar Dutt, a bit of a genius. He looks like a blend of Fatty Arbuckle and Norman Lamont, but his acting is delicate and his timing immaculate. You fully believe in this selfish, exhibitionist yet oddly innocent and benign old monster.

The play has its serious side. There are offhand mentions of the BNP, and, from Patel’s Dutt, memories of moving from an Indian village to a British town where people’s looks “went straight through you”. More centrally, the gradual emergence of young Atul and Vina’s marital problems reveal fractures in their parents’ marriages as well as between the generations. There’s a hint of incestuous feelings in one, and more than a hint of a gay past in the other. Both were clearly made in Bolton, not Heaven.

There are some fine supporting performances: from Ronny Jhutti as sensitive, truculent Atul, Rokhsaneh Ghawam-Shahidi as confused Vina and, especially, Meera Syal as Dutt’s wife, a shrewd and doughty matriarch who radiates both near-permanent exasperation at and deep devotion for her husband. And, given Patel’s performance, that’s understandable. Watch him cavort excitedly about after the wedding, dominating the proceedings and putting down the son who likes classical music. Watch his slow, baffled reaction as Vina’s parents discreetly reveal their virgin daughter’s married secrets. Watch him awkwardly reach out to the son who has good reason not to like or trust him. And, at a possibly sentimental denouement, watch him quietly sob. Lucky Bollywood. Lucky us.

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