In origin a Hindu religious festival that can last for up to a month, the mela has now become, in Britain, a weekend of general jollity, more town fair than festival, packed with stalls, bands, dancing, the lot; a family outing and a multiracial get-together. Something like 100,000 people cram Bradford’s Peel Park for the summer mela, and it is here that Tajinder Singh Hayer sets his glimpses of citizens at work and play. As he says, “In Britain we don’t have a huge promenading culture”, and occasions like this give us a chance to be entertained just by wandering around.

A wander through a crowd is essentially what his play is, though his characters reveal themselves more to those they know or work with than to passing strangers. Fighting seems an accepted ingredient, though here not inter-racial but directed against a uniformed soldier on recruitment duty. Fires are started but the only damage we hear about is the blaze at a continental cheese stall, presumably turning the area into a feast of fondu.

Presiding over the merriment and mayhem is an individual who starts off as undeniably real, heavily pregnant and stuck at the top of a stalled Ferris wheel. Yet by the time we have learnt that her name is Angela she has turned into I don’t know quite what. Part supernatural observer, like the angels in Wim Wenders’s movie Wings of Desire, but also a nagging voice tormenting the guilt-ridden soldier. The relish in Jessica Hall’s voice as she contemplates violence further confused me. Perhaps she is a Hindu goddess.

Movie-making looms large in the daydreams of Sajjad, the social idealist attractively played by Simon Rivers, though we are not given, alas, the details of his unwritten scenario, summarised by him as being like Lawrence of Arabia set in the Home Counties. Both he and his Sikh friend Ranjit (Jag Sanghera) also have vigorously serious moments, recalling life-changing events, and Ranjit’s lakeside conversion is beautifully shown using torches and see-through plastic beneath a huge full moon.

Robert Pickavance is impressive as an elderly survivor from the Warsaw ghetto and Nicholas Bailey as the fearsomely disturbed recruiting sergeant, and Hayer gives both of them their remembrances of a grim past. Only Balvinder Sopal, the prickly love interest, is without a scene to root her character in a back story.

With so few characters Alex Chisholm’s direction cannot create the sense of a crowd, but despite its puzzling elements a feeling emerges that the mela can be a time for renewal as well as a place to buy ethnic pottery.

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