If only life were like it is in the movies. At least that’s how the titular teenager in Amanda Whittington’s likeable cross-cultural play feels, specifically in relation to popular Indian cinema.

Originally staged at the Leicester Haymarket in 2003, the play has been revived to coincide with the International Indian Film Awards taking place in a handful of Yorkshire cities until June 10. Taking advantage of the generous dimensions of West Yorkshire Playhouse’s main stage, Nikolai Foster’s lively, feel-good production features wide-screen excerpts from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Heart Takes the Bride). A romantic epic with a Romeo and Juliet slant, this film has been playing continuously for nearly a dozen years at a cinema in Bombay.

Here, it’s the first Bollywood extravaganza that Nichola Burley’s white, working-class Jane has seen. Watching it is also among the first things she does after arriving in Bradford with her tough, financially unstable single mum Kate (Katherine Dow Blyton). As Whittington sympathetically shows, the kind of escapist pleasures these films offer helps to change this perky but put-upon adolescent’s life.

Whittington’s text is in the tradition of such gritty northern comedies as The Full Monty. Its closest precedent, however, is A Taste of Honey, by virtue of the squabbling intimacy of its central mother-daughter relationship. Jane and Kate are on the run from debts and, more significantly, the latter’s entanglement with a married man in the town they left behind. In Bradford Jane almost instantly hooks up with Dini (Darren Kuppan), an Indian lad exuberantly devoted to all things Bollywood thanks to his job at a run-down local cinema. But their fast friendship is undermined by his clandestine, noncommital relationship with the cinema’s proprietor, Aamir (Avin Shah).

In many South Asian communities homosexuality remains the love that dare not speak its name. Whittington’s handling of the issue courts no controversy, while the Bollywood angle lends a kitsch sparkle to the play’s persuasive kitchen-sink banalities. The Leeds-based choreographer Zoobin Surty is responsible for a couple of zippy, over-the-top dance routines for a motley 20-strong ensemble fronted by Kuppan and Burley. These two young actors are utterly winning in their professional stage debuts, and Dow Blyton tackles Kate’s embattled desperation with total conviction.

Cleverly staged on Colin Richmond’s double revolving set, this big, sweet, crowd-pleasing show would be best digested with a tub of popcorn.

Box office: 0113-213 7700/ www.wyp.org.uk . To June 30

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